“More than all the thoughts and feelings I have written down. I don't pretend to be a poet. I feel happy enough when someone is willing to read what I have written.”

“Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.”

“I have not written all this to complain: I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.”

“I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.”

“More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to be close to someone. More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to feel as if I wasn't alone.”

“I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.”

“When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”

“There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply…the person who wants to read what I have written.”

“Now that I have found someone
I'm feeling more alone
Than I ever have before.”

“I've told her a fairy tale that she doesn't remember. I have written hundreds of poems that could not touch her feelings. To her I was not a poet. To her I was not a good writer. I was not the right person for her to love.”