I believe a homely woman singing badly in a cellar is closer to the sacred than most things painted on a ceiling.
I believe grace does not wait for worthy people to administer it. It travels through cruelty, exhaustion, and bad temper as readily as through kindness, and it is no less real for the unreliable hands it passes through.
I believe a body in decline — diabetic, gouty, bald, unsteady on its feet — is not a subject a serious writer looks past on the way to something more dignified. It is where dignity actually lives, if it lives anywhere.
I believe the ordinary detail — a chipmunk on a patio, a bottle of suntan oil, a housedress with roses on it — is never only what it appears to be, and that a writer’s whole discipline is patience: watching a small thing long enough for it to tell you what it is actually for.
I believe fire is not only a punishment. I believe it is also, in the right light, at the right hour, on the right stretch of ordinary water, the exact material glory is made of.
I believe every student who has ever told me a poem is stupid, or that this isn’t math, or that they aren’t getting wet for nobody, already contains multitudes. Getting them to believe it is the whole of the job, and I have never once finished it in a single semester.
I believe a sentence should be revised until it knows more than the writer did when he started it, and that this is not a failure of planning. It is the only honest way a true sentence gets made.
I believe comedy and reverence are not opposites, that a family can be cruel and devoted in the same breath, and that fiction which resolves this contradiction too neatly has lied about something.
I believe in the narrow doorway — that nobody gets through it alone, that we are all helped along by someone else’s arm, and that this is not a diminishment of the journey but the entire point of it.
I believe a book, a poem, or a classroom is a place where a person can be told, truthfully, for the first time: you are altogether beautiful, and there is no flaw in you. I believe that sentence is worth an entire working life spent trying to earn the right to say it.