impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

Persona: writers and poets often speak in voices which are not their own voice. Its dangerous to assume that a love song is about a love affair that the author really had, or that the politics of a chronicle are the politics which the author would express over a jug of beer.

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

I think that our traditional Western way is to try to capture life in a net of words. But I think one can realize that the net of words is a part of life. The danger is not in using the words; the danger is in clinging to them, clinging to their meaning, and saying, “Oh, now I have spoken a great truth.”