Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

If you're a "good" teacher, somebody who is responsible or careful, teaching takes time. Teaching is performative. Students nowadays evaluate you and there's a lot made in these evaluations about how you perform. Maybe you don't have the greatest delivery in the world. But you know a lot, have a lot to offer. So that's pretty unsettling. We've become so image-based and performance-based as a society. You have to be ready to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" at any moment.

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.

A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice.

[Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.

I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.

Nothing is a matter of age. It's really in the person because you can publish book after book after book and still want that golden apple. And maybe it's the reality principle that has hit me. I believe that a career is very different from writing. My career is a certain kind of career.