A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .

A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.

In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.