I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.
NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
The earth is blue like an orange.
I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.
It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.
There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.
Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.
All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Language is the machine of the poet.
