"I believe art is utterly important. It..." - Quote by Mary Oliver

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

“If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.”

“Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?”

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.”

“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”

“When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.”

“Imagination is more valuable than information.”

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”

“It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.”