“Do you have the courage to be a poet?” Gilbert asked the graduate student, after all. We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all,

So we would go scrumping—do you know the term “to scrump”? It’s an English word that basically means to steal apples, but also has come to mean to steal any type of fruit.

Great art reaches through the fog, toward this secret heart—and it shows it to you, holds it before you.

I think “I’m in the reservation of my mind” has an incredibly destructive connotation for me now. It’s apocalyptic, when I think about it. The human journey has always been about movement. And a century ago, when we moved onto the reservation, my tribe stopped moving. All the innovation we’ve done since then has been just modeling after Europeans.

the first sentence is the handshake, on either side of the writer-reader divide.

sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out.

What I have to do is go back to my beginner’s mind, trying as much as possible to get rid of all my assumptions, the usual pat thoughts, the confusions I have, the conclusions that cause me to contrive direction in the story.

play strict science fiction golf, which means to me avoiding the clumsy integration of exposition or contextual information, even when dealing with terms and technologies the reader won’t recognize