Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.