If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.