First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . C. Day Lewis True ease in writing comes from art, not chance. Every poem or story has a beginning, a muddle, and an end. In the early throes of an idea there is for me only grammar of the mind, which is a flow of thought as natural and precise as the flow of a river to the sea.
Every word is a preconceived judgment.
Nietzsche We . . . write to heighten our own awareness of life . We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection . . . . We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it . . . to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth . . . to expand our world when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely . . . . When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I lose my color, my fire.