“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.”

“Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

“When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.”

“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”