It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.