Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

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

Stories are the reproductive organs of language.

The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.

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.

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 .