“Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. … We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.

There is no person without a world.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

Tasteless is a life without your courage, for courage is the salt to your bread. So dare, dare to stare that monster in the eye, that fear that fiddles under your bed.

Dare to dream and watch your dreams dare.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

If I’m sharing you with myself, I’m daring to share your thirst for warmth, your body and soul, even your mistakes gone wrong.

We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.

I jab my own heart with a knife, thinking about you on and on. How dare you enter my life just to make me feel torn?

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.