When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

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

My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

We don't know our own story.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.