The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.