A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

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.