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

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

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.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.