Every word was once a poem.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

A word of all the words I've got in there...
But if I wrote... Let's get it written, then,
This letter I've composed a hundred times,
Written and rewritten in my mind: it's ready
And all I have to do is lay my soul
Open beside the paper and copy it out.

Weigh every word before you speak it.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.