The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

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.

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

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

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

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.