Even angels have their wicked schemes and you take that to new extremes.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.
For me, as I've said many times, the story is not research. The story is how the characters relate with each other and with the environment. . . I try to apply my imagination to what could have happened and how a little child could have viewed and processed the event.
Action must be taken at once, there is no time to be lost.
I think paranoia goes from generation to generation. It's convenient to imagine that there's a few people controlling everything, that way it's manageable and small. But that's not life, life is messy.