The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.

Getting even is one reason for writing.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.