poems are small moments of enlightenment

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

Writing is the act of discovery.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.

Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)

Talking doesn't get your point across but listening does.

I am a big man, but I've allowed my condition to deteriorate by being overweight.

The players are looking forward to it because they'd like revenge

I've got two vices: cigarettes and taters.

'Psycho' is fascinating philosophically, because the point of 'Psycho' is that everything that's bad happens because of love.

Then I got together with my brother and a friend and we decided to play dates. The more we played, the more we wanted to do it. And it got to a stage where we wanted to do it all the time.

... and when he put his mind to it, he could make his words coil themselves around and around the listener until they held her in some sort of a mild hypnotic spell.

Just when exactly does the Millennium begin? Some say 1999, some say 2000, and some say 2001. You wait a thousand years for one, and three turn up at once.

We have very close humanitarian contacts [with China], wide-ranging youth exchanges, educational and regional contacts, and all of them continue to develop.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.