"A help to me in working things out has been to keep an honest—as honest as the human being can be—unpublishable journal. Granted, much of my non-fiction work is lifted directly from my journals, but what I use is only a small fraction of these numerous bulky volumes. If I can write things out I can see them, and they are not trapped within my own subjectivity. I have been keeping these notebooks of thoughts and questions and sometimes just garbage (which needs to be dumped somewhere) since I was about nine, and they are, I think, my free psychiatrist’s couch."

"A writer must be both detached and involved simultaneously. We cannot afford either as writers or as human beings to be detached from the human predicament, because this is what we write about and it’s the predicament we ourselves are in. We cannot afford to be detached from what is going on in Vietnam or in Jerusalem or in New York City or in Wheaton. We are always on stage, actors in the human drama. But we are also simultaneously members of the audience.

This knowledge came to my creative unconscious mind long before I understood it with the above-the-eyebrow part. One of my college assignments was to write a story in the present tense, first person. And I wrote an oddly detached story, one that I was really was at that time incapable of writing. But it wrenched itself out of me leaving me physically drained and emotionally exhilarated. It was a story of a painter who was watching his wife die. He loved her. He was in agony over her death. He hated his friends who came to help. He hated his friends who didn’t come to help. He was totally involved in grief. But all the time that his wife was dying, he couldn’t stop one part of his mind from considering exactly how to paint her, how to mix the colors to show the shadow of death moving across her face.

Obviously, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I wrote the story, but it taught me a lot about the ambivalence of involvement/detachment that happens to all artists."

"you who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who were lost from the start i don’t even know what songs would please you. i have given up trying to recognise you in the surging wave of the next moment. all the immense images in me–the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, you, beloved, who are all the gardens i have ever gazed at, longing. an open window in a country house, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. streets that i chanced upon, you had just walked down them and vanished. and sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. who knows perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening"