Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

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.

Sometimes in life, you have to take difficult steps and tough decisions, in order to achieve something bigger.

If we are to judge of love by its consequences it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.

My dad is kind of a rascal, like in a Dickensian sense. He just goes from career to career.

The only way to keep a broken vessel full is to keep it always under the tap.

You are never tempted by a devil without you, but by a devil within you.

Censoring what you say is one of the ways in which people who are not nice can take away your personal freedom.

I don't think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.

This is the theater. And this is the best place for the imagination.

Necessity invented stools, Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs, And luxury the accomplish'd Sofa last.

She cannot love, nor take no shape nor project or affection, she is so self-endeared