Quotes from Steven Heighton

It's no sin to tell a good story.

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms prepare themselves,

Love . . . requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)

Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)

An Elegy, Years After Sarah" So her ceiling a map of stars. First time we made love late afternoon late winter, and after she slept how her room fogged up with dusk and paper stars she'd stuck up there in childhood came out in strange constellations and I missed the earth till her room was night her breath deepening the stars cooling down: I said come closer and her eyes — half-open, flashing back whatever light there was — went out.

the one small wisdom he has gained from his life is that, when flags start to wave, someone must always refuse to join in.

Love is the underground force that here and there drives springs to the surface of life's quotidian waste.