The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

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.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

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.

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

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.