What I want is for people to be treated better, to be paid better, and when you start doing something simple , it forces your price point up, which means that you have to produce a higher quality product in order to justify that.

I think it is important for everybody to bring their spending habits into line with their ideals.

What I want is for people to be treated better, to be paid better, and when you start doing something simple , it forces your price point up, which means that you have to produce a higher quality product in order to justify that.

The challenge of nonfiction is keeping the attention of a reader over span of time, and to keep the quality of the writing as high as it needs to be to keep people's attention.

Poetry is basically built out of what I think of as being a fairly political act at its core: "I'm not going to listen to how you described things. I'm going to look at them much more intensely and carefully than most people do, and certainly more intensely than our culture wants us to." The mission of the poem, of course, is to try to find the way to do that in the smallest amount of space possible.

The pleasure of nonfiction is that it takes all of that sort of artistic and observational skill, but then there's a more intellectual layer on top of it: it's not enough to make us see things in new ways, we have to try to figure out what that means for the way we live.

It's surprising how a minor slump in sales can have a huge impact, and can actually cut so significantly into margin that the company really feels it.