The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.

The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.