If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.