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

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

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.