Alexicon91 AuthenticAdventures AuspiciousAmbition

“We live in ignorance of what the next second holds. There are things beyond our control that come to us unbidden. In those moments, anxieties that multiply endlessly cause us to imagine fearful scenarios. Even though these are stories of our own fabrication, we are threatened by them as if they were immutable futures handed down to us by someone.

Writing poetry is “self-forgetfulness. That is the suffering of being human —self-consciousness." When she can get beyond it, that, she said, "is the great liberation."

"…with that profound ignorance that expresses itself as contentment."

“Aloneness gives one the room and the incentive to make art-and gets you in the habit of talking to yourself.”

“I haven't had a novel begin to bore me. And that's probably because I keep thinking I will find a way to make it better. But you know it's also true that you don't want to take forever to write a novel because you don't want to get to the point where the book ceases to be—I guess, you just don't want to outgrow it."

“I think it's really hard to comfortably separate talent from this unquenchable interest in the problem presented by the task…and I started writing and realized that I felt that way about writing. That the fundamental question, Can you do some sort of justice to life using only words and ink? was endlessly interesting to me.”

"Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world."