Writer

You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.

My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.

Sometimes, I tell my wife I have to take a car trip and collect new memories - I like to drive around at absolute random for weeks on end through the United States and parts of Canada. Or else I feel trapped, like you feel when your life is completely planned for months in advance, and you think you're not getting enough oxygen.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

I don't trust anybody that doesn't do good work. I don't give them any credibility. If they can't write, why should I believe anything they have to say?

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I don't want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I'm a big deal, because it doesn't help you do your work. I think people like Hemingway got into an awful lot of trouble that way.

Age focuses you. You are much better concentrated. There's more time when you travel less, don't do book tours, avoid interviews or public appearances. You walk the dogs, fish, hunt, cook and write.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four.

Sometimes, discomfort is very uncomfortable. Anybody can get occasionally tired of it, and then it can change fast, where it's comfort that disturbs you.

I won't talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it. It's a waste of my time. If they don't feel 'called' - why in God's name would you do this?

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.