I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)