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.
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.
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.
NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
The earth is blue like an orange.
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.
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.
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.
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
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.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.
All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Books are a time machine.
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
