When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

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.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.

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.