With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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.

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

I don't gamble. I invest with a risk.

After many decades of Disney movies, we have been conditioned to expect princesses to fall in love quickly with their charming princes and 'live happily ever after.'

When you get over the anxiety, you discover you should have been mad a long time ago.

Champions don't become champions in the field---they are merely recognized there.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.

Try and fail,but don't fail to try.

I believe in the single standard -- for men and women.