Fiction Is About Intimacy With

One Of The Biggest Changes That Ever Occurred In My Life Was Going From The Isolation Of Working Part-time As A House Painter In Henderson County, To Cornell, Where Everybody Was A Literary Person.

Neither Of My Parents Has Been Very Sensitive About My Writing.

If A Poem Is Not Memorable, There's Probably Something Wrong. One Of The Problems Of Free Verse Is That Much Of The Free Verse Poetry Is Not Memorable.

The Language Poets Are Writing Only About Language Itself. The Ashbery Poets Are Writing Only About Poetry Itself. That Seems To Me A Kind Of Dead End.

When You Have An Idea For A Story, You Want Those Characters To Reach As Many People As You Can. I Think You Normally Think Of Prose As A Way Of Doing That. It Fits Our Time, The Culture.