Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

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.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

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