Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

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.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.