You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.

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

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.