 The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. |
| I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing. |
| Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form. |
| If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me. |
| I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. |
| Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners. |
| One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice. |
| Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques. |
| Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there. |
| Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. |
| I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do. |
| What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it. |
| I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that. |
| A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. |
| In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible. |
| One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person. |
| In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out. |
| Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places. |
| The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. |
| In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. |
