There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.

There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.

It may very well be that people in San Francisco don't think we have any culture in Nebraska, but we have a different culture, and it's a very deep culture. We have these Czech immigrants, who are making this marvelous ethnic food and their Catholic lives and it's very fascinating stuff.

I try to be realistic with students. And say that there's a good chance that they're not going to get a creative writing teaching job, that there aren't enough jobs to go around and the university faculties are cutting back on staff and that they may have to get some other kind of work. None of them wants to hear that, but it is true and I think I'm a good example for them of somebody who took the other route.

This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness.

Every time somebody writes a theory about where literature's going, that person is not only contributing thought but nudging things to happen in one way or the other. Just as in painting, there's much more interest in the American scene painters and the early American... like the Ashcan school of painters. Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that Norman Rockwell would again be considered a serious painter? And yet, there are a lot of people who are saying Rockwell was a very accomplished technician. These things are constantly moving.

I had in effect been thrown out of graduate school because I was a lousy graduate student, and I had to find a job, and I took the first job that came along. It happened to be a management trainee job in a life insurance company, and I just stayed. It was always, mainly, the idea was that I would support myself as a writer, and I knew I would have to have some sort of work, and it didn't make a whole lot of difference to me what it was. I mean, I could have been a paper hanger or something for that matter.