Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.

God'll send the bill to you.

In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term 'newsweekly' seems almost quaint.

It wasn't until I got involved in Doctor Who that I started doing dramas on television.

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

Ben's tongue is like sunscreen...It's good for your health and should be applied liberally.

We have no cause to be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ; but the Gospel of Christ may justly be ashamed of us.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

I liked the idea of being a writer and letting somebody else do the graft.

The tongue of a fool is the key of his counsel, which, in a wise man, wisdom hath in keeping.