"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something."

"A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it."

"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."

"Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it."

"I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry."

"For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures."

"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well."