Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.