Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

There is such a shelter in each other.

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

You can´t gossip about somebody you prayed for. (sb on your prayer list)

History teaches us every day

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

Into the darkness they go the wise and the lovely.

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

As I absorbed life here and understood it better, I just completely fell in love with England.

When I was 14, I played in a summer league. One night the chief umpire asked me if I would like to try umpiring. There was a Little League tournament coming up and he needed more umpires than he had.

Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation. Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound.

There's no greater feeling than moving a man from Point A to Point B, against his will.

Nostalgia wouldn't begin to capture your sense of loss, ... The Way We Really Are Coming to Terms With America's Changing Families.