'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty -- wherever they are -- and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

Art's too long and life's too short.

In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don't live with a lover or roommate who doesn't respect your work. Don't lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

I developed a definition -- which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world -- that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.