True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

True power is given to the vulnerable.

A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.

Fire is a good companion for the mind.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.

In old age there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.