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

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.

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.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.