I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.