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Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affi...more

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I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented ...more

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All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a ma...more

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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

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The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

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It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand a...more

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Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess,...more

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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

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You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

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The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the west...more

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Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. T...more

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In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except t...more

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It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...more

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins...more