I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love.

In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.