“In the past I've resisted [interviews]
. . . because of the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself—‘Do you work on a fixed schedule every day?’ ‘On which side of the paper do you write?’”

“I think that if humans are still walking around in fifty years, and still reading fiction, my work will last that long. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“. . . If [you] want to publish the lie perceived behind the interview, [you have] to write fiction.”

“The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It's a way of having experience without having to struggle through it.”

“What I really believe is that there are no minor characters in life or in art.”

 

“While my father was milking the cows my mother would come out and read something to him—Lear, say—leaving out the part of whomever my father felt like being that day, and he'd answer his lines from the cow.”

I wish you could just say, This is a book—­not have to call it anything. Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air. 

 

“Getting even is one great reason for writing.”

“I wanted to make room for antiheroes.”

“When I started out I wouldn't write a poem until I knew the first line and the last line . . . I was a tyrant and I was good at it.”

“What happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?”

On meeting J. D. Salinger: “Then he said . . . ‘I'd like you to publish my novel.’ I said, ‘What novel?’ He said, ‘Oh, it isn't finished. It's about a kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.’”

“Unless you can say disorganization is a process, I confess I don’t have one.”

“Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed.”

“When I was twelve

. . . I'd write little book reviews. There was a review of . . . Pepys's Diary . . . and I didn’t see that there was any difference between [the kids’ books I read at the time] and . . . Pepys's Diary.”

“Jefferson had helped create his own country. But he wanted black people to leave it. All of that made me think about the idea of a nation—what does it mean to be a nation of people? How do you create one?”

“That’s the hardest thing to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.”

“Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader.”

“It is enraging to work in words, sometimes; no wonder writers are often nervous and crazy: Paint seems to be a more benevolent, a more soothing and serene-making medium.”

“[There] is all this narrowing to a now in which there’s only room for effect, not enough room for cause—and so no duration in which to experience personal accountability.”

On the extinction of dinosaurs: “When they died, they died in a very clean way
. . . This will not happen with human beings. When we die there will be a terrible breath of poison.”

On the origins of Wife to Mr. Milton: “I'd always hated Milton, from earliest childhood, and I wanted to find out the reason. I found it. His jealousy. It's present in all his poems . . . ”

“I meant my first novel to be an epic which would contain, in an artistic narrative, ‘everything I knew.’”

“The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.”

“For a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.”

“On January 10, 1974, Transports et Transit Maritimes Associés came to the rue de Tournon and took away three large metal trunks and I closed the Paris office of The Paris Review for good.”

“I need, physically need, several hours every day to be alone and write.”

“Novelists [are] only a couple of hundreds of years old. Playwrights [are] a couple of thousands of years old.”

“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.”

“It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical.”

“At lunch Robert [Bly] said, ‘Well, Mr. Hall, what do you think of having a poet for a son?’ As I feared, my father didn't know what to say; poetry was embarrassing, somehow. So I said, ‘Too bad your father doesn't have the same problem . . . ’”

“A strict form such as mine cannot be achieved through improvisation.”

Barry Hannah on self-hating Southerners, .45 caliber teaching tools, and overcoming alcoholism: "I was often taught that everything is worth it for art. Everything. It was a cult."

Explaining her remark that Henry James was “the greatest American female novelist”: ”Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.”

“You don't write—an artist doesn't create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes.”

“The foregrounding of artifice—dwelling on the making of the poem, in a poem—seems to go to the core of what poetry is, doesn’t it? That it offers a place in language where we don’t forget that we’re using language?”

As long as I have music, I don’t ever feel like I’m solitary. It changes the air in the room. It’s the most consistent thing in my life. 

 

“Housman's reference to the hairs rising at the back of one's neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.”

On poetry’s power to suspend violence: “It can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”

On being called for congratulations by Jack Kerouac after beating him out for the Prix de Rome: “I was abroad at the time, but he was, my parents wrote me, genial and sincere and a little high.”

“Often when I am very tired, just before going to bed, while washing my face and brushing my teeth, my mind gets very clear . . .”

On the difficulties of writing about McCarthyism: “Few people acted large enough for drama and not pleasant enough for comedy.”

On writer’s block: “If an electrician said, I have electrician's block. . . . He would be committed. One thing would be certain, and that is that his paralysis in the face of his work would have only to do with him, and not with his craft.”

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

“I assemble stories—me and a hundred million other people—at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.”

“Can you imagine the sort of letters Henry James would have gotten had he written The Turn of the Screw in the first person?”

“I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence . . . so much as it's been
. . . the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

“One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?”

“It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”

It’s a little strange to encounter Michael Hofmann in Gainesville. He has taught creative writing for over twenty years at the University of Florida, whose sprawling campus is dominated on its northern edge by a football stadium, the Swamp, where orange-and-blue Gators chomp their unlucky opponents. A short drive from there, you can pick your way past dozens of real gators, dusky green and preternaturally still, in the Paynes Prairie Preserve, which is also home to herds of wild horses and bison. How the bison got to Florida, and why they stayed, must be an interesting story. In one of Hofmann’s few Gainesville poems, “Freebird,” written after his first visit in 1990, he quotes D. H. Lawrence: “One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America.”

“Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean.”

“I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.”

Born in London in 1945, Richard Holmes has written ten biographies and books of biographical essays. Even in his early works Shelley (1974) and Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), Holmes demonstrates a keen eye for place and a striking empathy for his subjects. 

“I think that when one is dead one should be a little bit bolder, so that the rest of us may have some record of how things actually were.”

“It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think.”

On having been a precocious child: “Of course, what precocity gave, socialization took away, and I hope the rather nasty designation ‘precocious child’ faded away before (at least!) adolescence.”

“I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.”

“You live one life of invention and another in reality. As the first grows, the second shrinks—there’s no way around it.”

“The poetry shock that hit the U.K. in the sixties started before the Beatles. Sylvia responded to the first ripples of it. In a sense, Ariel is a response to those first signs, and she never heard the Beatles.”

“Some people are born with an amazing gift for storytelling; it’s a gift which I’ve never had at all.”

“I'm not a Buddha in the sense of I can sit under a tree for a thousand years. Who can? The climate doesn't allow for it, anyway . . . ”

“I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

“Man, to put it in Swiftian terms Swift could never utter, is the cancer of the planet!”

“I detest and despise success, yet I cannot do without it. I am like a drug addict if nobody talks about me for a couple of months I have withdrawal symptoms.”

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”

On writing for the entertainment industry: “I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent. But are you going to sink or swim?”

“I’ve never been intimidated by the idea of having to make up a story. It’s always been a relatively easy thing that people did in a relaxed environment.”