'Little Night' has layers of meaning. There's something enchanted about night. All those heavenly bodies, shooting stars, the crescent moon, celestial phenomenon. Owls fly at night, and first kisses happen. Night is romantic. Alternately, darkness hides the worst of human behavior.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

Many, many years ago, when you named alternates, and they wouldn't travel with you - I think you're dealing with a small roster. Now you travel with these alternates, which you can replace at any time, obviously, if it's a medical situation, so you have it in your back pocket.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

In basic research, intellectual rigor and sentimental freedom necessarily alternate.

I have no intention of lingering through a season, just to have a chance to be an alternate on a relay. I don't want that.

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~

Writing is the voices inside our heads, our minds, the creativity that exists for us to, from nothing, create alternate worlds, manipulate a personality or to introduce a new kind of love, a new kind of hate or pain or happiness or wonder or... anything we want. Through words, we can do, we can be anything we want.

It is only after we face the horrors of our world in some alternate, more digestible form, that we can begin to come to terms with their existence.

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn't break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world's presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

I think movies are good for getting into dream states or exploring weird alternate states of thinking.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy one has a success but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time it's just wonderful.