It is as if producing a creative work tears a piece from your soul. When it is ripped completely free of you, the wound must bleed for a while. How similar it is to letting go of a dream, your hope, or your heart’s desire. You must open up and let it drain.

If by a soul one means the creature who lives within each of us, a creature born loving, born joyful, but who with each worldly blow shrinks more deeply into its shell until at last, the poor desiccated thing is unrecognizable even to its own self, yes. I do.

Tell me, who is behind a great woman? That’s right. No one. She has to get there herself.

Fortunate is the person who can succeed in extracting honey from such a flower as this life, whose root and every petal is bitterness.

Madness,” he said quietly, “is as a drop of ink in water. It sends sly tendrils from the afflicted person into everyone around until all are shaded in black. Soon one does not know who is mad and who is not.

Americans are being poisoned, all in the name of profit, producing a weak-minded race of people who are given to lust and desire.

The unspoken truth was that New Yorkers considered everyone in the world to be just a tad - well, more than just a tad, a lot more than a tad - old-fashioned compared with themselves.

What did I expect him to say--that he would leave his wife? To do so was the province of fiction. Real life was not as easy as that.

In spite of Mr. Poe's fame, the pair made me feel out of sorts, and sad. In one of the busiest cities in the world, they seemed to exist on a bleak island of their own making, their backs turned against the social tide lapping at the battered door.

Did Mr. Poe write as a boy?Dear me, yes. It was all he had, what with losing his mother as a toddling child and then being cast aside by his foster father. I think sometimes his pen was his only friend in the world