A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

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.

Be cheerful and hopeful.

Patch backed me into a tree and kissed me, hard. I regained my breath. "Boys take not everywhere: That was a kiss.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

Take a deep breath, listen to your favorite song and realize everything is gonna be okay, nothing is permanent.

I would have preferred to be successful here with a piece that cost me a huge amount of money and effort... rather than sending to Bohemia some ordinary works.

It is no happiness to live long, nor unhappiness to die soon; happy is he that hath lived long enough to die well.

I mean there is an assumption made that Islam is about submission, and I think that the submission that we have is to God.

Did you see more glass?

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

I hate it when bands do that; they're so proud of their new album, they have to play all of it and a couple of golden oldies.