Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

Marketing rules, OK? I have no illusions that intelligence could possibly replace marketing in this or any other matter. Commercial genrification has its reasons. They are intelligible reasons, though not intelligent ones.

I have more trust in my Inner Teacher. She is subtle and humble because she hopes to be understood. She contains contradictory opinions without getting indigestion. She can mediate between the arrogant artist self who mutters, “I don’t give a damn if you don’t understand me,” and the preacher self who shouts, “Now hear this!” She doesn’t declare tr

The problem with all this is that your real is not my real. We don’t all perceive reality the same way. Some of us in fact do not perceive reality at all. You can definitely see that if you watch Fox News.

and that direction is towards the reinclusion of fantasy as an essential element of fiction. Or put it this way: fiction—writing it, reading it—is an act of the imagination.

To be friends with the animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it.

In postindustrial civilisation, where animals are held to be irrelevant to adult concerns except insofar as they are useful or edible, animal story is mostly perceived as being for children.

Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and

I seek the appropriateness of sound to sense.

A poem or story consciously written to address a problem or bring about a specific result, no matter how powerful or beneficent, has abdicated its first duty and privilege, its responsibility to itself. Its primary job is simply to find the words that give it its right, true shape. That shape is its beauty and its truth.