His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.
I draw inspiration from everything I've seen and been through. My life has been my biggest teacher.
I always say, keep a diary and someday it'll keep you.
Storytelling is about patience, about making sense of the moments of pathos and beauty that you find, and about carrying these moments back into your own life.
I feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.
Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.
What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'
It's easier to write from my own life, and it's also more fun. I always write about relationships, for instance, whether they're romantic relationships, friendships, encounters... there's always a lesson to be learned from them.
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
Going through something difficult in your life, music, for me, is always a friend and something that helps you to figure things out.
I am probably exaggerating a little, but I owe my equilibrium to ink and paper.
Sometimes the worst things that you can say really teach you a lot about what you can learn.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.
It's amazing how much the sense of telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end helps me to relax. I find that the mass of stories that one is subjected to living one's life is otherwise overwhelming.
I always kept a diary - not a diary like, 'Dear Diary, we got up at 5 A.M., and I wore the weird hair again and that white dress! Hi-yeee!' I'd just write.
