Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

The only thing standing between you and your dreams is ... reluctance.

The gift of prayer is priceless gift.

When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.

Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.

Penny saved is a penny got.

A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track-an inch between wreck and smooth-rolling prosperity.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

That's what Glocks are. High-precision killing machines that scream "Daddy Issues.

Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill.