“I am accountable to the composer, but I am also there to communicate something to the listener. I am not delivering a soliloquy, but am somewhere in the middle.”

Variant: I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 20

The Wild Boys (1971)

Griffin Prize Questionnaire June 2012
Griffin Poetry Prize Questionnaire

Source: True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? … As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. … I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall.
Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming.

About the origin of his interest in biology in an "Interview with George Gamow", by Charles Weiner at Professor Gamow's home in Boulder, Colorado (25 April 1968)

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

U.S. Commerce nominee Ross says NAFTA is Trump's first trade priority https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-us-commerce-nominee-ross-says-nafta-is-trumps-first-trade-priority-2017-1-1001675930 (January 18, 2017)