Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life, which begins with this incredible first sentence: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”

For me, almost everything in literature almost always comes down to the question of point of view. Whose story is this, and who’s telling the story of that person?

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Bannerman came to regard the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dream-state of film.”

sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out.

if I had to narrow down the greatest gratitude of my university years, it would be reading Toni Morrison—specifically, reading Beloved. Perhaps more than any other text, Beloved made me the person I am. It’s the book that altered my personal and creative DNA.

Beloved’s thesis is that, until a real and honest relationship with the past is achieved—until we’ve pierced the collective amnesia, overcome the level upon level of denial—it is impossible for us to have a future.

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerated five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final

I think “I’m in the reservation of my mind” has an incredibly destructive connotation for me now. It’s apocalyptic, when I think about it. The human journey has always been about movement. And a century ago, when we moved onto the reservation, my tribe stopped moving. All the innovation we’ve done since then has been just modeling after Europeans.

I think I read recently that we’re not suffering from an overflow of information—we’re suffering from an overflow of insignificance.