“You want to set this one down so you can take a breath, and keep reading–all at the same time.”

Habit is the best thing for you if you’re trying to write prose.

I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.

This is much more than your typical thriller. Tim Johnston has written a book that makes Gone Girl seem gimmicky . . . Johnston is an excellent writer.

Time is our present breath.

We can always find time to breathe. In the same way, if we see the importance of meditation practice we will find the time to practice.

Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

When I feel myself getting overwhelmed, I take a deep breath and eat a piece of chocolate.

the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.

Missing you just runs too deep. Oh I can’t breathe, thinking of your smile.