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

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.