You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

I'm a staunch civil libertarian; I really believe that the individual is more important than any societal value.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

When you're reading my book, you're not in a four dimensional continuum, you're in my continuum, the Grossman continuum.