If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.

The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.

The weird thing was that I went to Trump rallies thinking I was going to run into militant, right wing, racist people and mostly I didn't. That should have been a clue to me. The people I talked to were not, on the surface level, crazy. They were quite nice, quite normal, employed, and actually were wealthier than the press at that time would have led us to believe. At that time, the narrative was that these were all working poor but these were not working poor. That should've been a clue to me that this was a little bigger than I thought.

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.