To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

I get great pleasure from creativity and writing, especially novels. It gives me a lot of energy, and for me it is more pleasurable than sex or food or anything. And I am a happy person because of this pleasure.

Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

I love the stuff and material of writing: words. The games you can play with them. The rhythm and lyricism in a good passage of writing. The power of a simple sentence. I also love the paradoxical bind of writing as both freedom and constraint. You start creating characters and scenes out of thin air. But if you do it well enough, that freedom constricts, because your characters are no longer inside you. They become their own people, agents on the page who need to act and think and feel in ways true to who they are…

For me, writing a poem means enormous enjoyment that reaches its culmination when the poem appears in print.

I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. And about sex. Writing for me is about my freedom. When I was a kid, my parents were like monsters to me, and the world extended from them. They were horrible. And I was this good little girl — I didn't have the guts to oppose them. They told me what to do and how to be. So the only time I could have any freedom or joy was when I was alone in my room. Writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. So writing was really associated with body pleasure — it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had.

what was the best part of writing. The main thing for me is characters. I don’t really worry about anything else. I don’t think about the storyline too much actually – just the characters and what might happen to them because of who they are and where they are and who they interact with. The settings, the stories, the themes and the voices and everything else, the inter- relationships – all belong to the characters. So if you keep true to those characters and how they might develop because of who they are and who they have around them and, to a degree, what happens to them, then the story will unfold. I’ve learned to have faith that something will come out.

The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me.

To me, Writing is Fun. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing, as long as you can tell a story.

Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions