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.

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.

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.

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.

Breathe Through the Pain, It Always Gets Easier with Time.

Failure is good. It's fertilizer. Everything I've learned about coaching, I've learned from making mistakes.

And I have two eyes. I’ve seen that little melodrama play out between you and that other tracker. Fish? Flounder? What’s his name?

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

The world would be better and brighter if people were taught the duty of being happy as well as the happiness of doing their duty.

Pumpkin spice lattes are egg nog for morning people.

I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person.

It's not really a question of who is biased, but which bias is the correct bias with which to be biased!

Plant the love of the holy ones within your spirit; don't give your heart to anything, but the love of those whose hearts are glad.

The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.