Indeed, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem heavy and opaque.

In the infinite universe of literature there are always other avenues to explore, some brand-new and some exceedingly ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world.

His novel shows us how everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness.

In each case his power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live, a reality he carries with him and bears as his personal burden.

Here, certainly, the myth is telling me something, something that is implicit in its images and can’t be explained by other means. Perseus masters that terrible face by keeping it hidden, just as he had earlier defeated it by looking at its reflection.

The lesson we can draw from a myth lies within the literality of its story, not in what we add to it from without.

I am immediately tempted to find in this myth an allegory of the relationship between the poet and the world, a lesson about how to write.

Perhaps I was only then becoming aware of the heaviness, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that quickly adhere to writing if one doesn’t find a way to give them the slip.

I soon realized that the gap between the realities of life that were supposed to be my raw materials and the sharp, darting nimbleness that I wanted to animate my writing was becoming harder and harder for me to bridge.