One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

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.

Nothing on earth can function successful outside the laws of the kingdom

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

Real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

Education is the way to achieve far-reaching results, it is the proper way to promote compassion and tolerance in society.

The time to pray is not when we are in a tight spot but just as soon as we get out of it.

We'd like to apologise to the fans, the chairman, the staff and everyone connected to Newcastle

I'm somebody who gets a lot of inspiration from dreams.

It isn't illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!

This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.

To sit at one's table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a Squeezer pen - that is true happiness.