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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much sal...more

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At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. ...more

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We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the li...more

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Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? ...more

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Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at ...more

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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in exper...more

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Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk i...more

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If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets ...more

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In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.

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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many ...more

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Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

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Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a...more

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So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form ha...more

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Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got t...more

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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feelin...more