“And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third time one leg, and B,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze.But method A is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.”

“When the ink runs dry, you’re most likely writing at the wrong angle.”

“I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.”

“My fear has brazenly taken pen in hand and redefined a horizon as the termination of everything instead of the beginning of many things. And the first thing I need to do is get my pen back.”

“She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.”

“Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.”

“Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don’t blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.”

“I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,/ They’ll say it’s stolen, or else, it was by chance.”

“Silence is death, and you, if you talk, you die, and if you remain silent, you die. So, speak out and die.”

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“The silence of the pen is only made louder by the sound of the ink running dry.”

“the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.”

“I am a prisoner of my own pen.”