With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

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.

My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.

It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.

Stories are the reproductive organs of language.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.