I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
“I don’t know what the voice of my poetry is. I suppose it’s mine but it is a part of me that I’m only in touch with while I’m writing. I don’t see it as like my conversational voice or like anybody else’s voice that I know. It is a voice that occasionally intrudes in my ordinary thinking. Suddenly a line of what appears to be poetry will pop into my mind and I will have no idea where it came from.”
John Ashbery