Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words.

it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both. I think that’s why my books tend to begin as first sentences—I’ll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I’ll start to think I really have something.

I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character—and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel—is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, together, make sense of character.

Jack Gilbert addresses this experience directly in “A Brief for the Defense”: “If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,” he writes, “we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.”

This passage is an expression of how alone we are, really. How fully we live inside our minds,

What I have to do is go back to my beginner’s mind, trying as much as possible to get rid of all my assumptions, the usual pat thoughts, the confusions I have, the conclusions that cause me to contrive direction in the story.

There’s really only one audience for poetry these days: poets themselves.

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.

There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it.