I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world the culture we are in to art right now.
The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together an anti-vehicle device.
It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.
Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.
I always had good students.
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
I'm an amateur so I read what's interesting to me.
If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership.
Hollywood is the model for publishing more and more. Not just blockbusters either.
People do not read by and large. They watch television.
Oh a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it thanks. I'll eat it here.
The best defense is a good story.
Baseball is a game where you are always waiting and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.
Let's look at what the books are that are being produced. More and more they are being made like movies. To sell. They are being tested out.
I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.
Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.
There is a lack of context in contemporary education. And contemporary consideration - because we live in those interiorities so much. Especially young kids who live by surfing the Web.
When you are writing a character what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his words.
I don't think I want to write a third book. But the more people talk to me about it the more I think maybe I do.
It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world to encompass the literature necessary for the information.
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
The culture is with some rapidity fearing its imagination. I don't know why. Imagination is not of interest.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
My heroes are people like Philip Levine who is simply like a god to me as a writer. And he is a very good man too.
I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.
What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it how simple it is to give how hard to lose.
I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt I would think.
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock which is a novelist.
Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer ' and never ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.
I know important literary writers who can't get published.
Nonfiction for the most part is facts and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?
I get to meet writers and I love writers.
History is beautiful stories or scary stories yeah.