"Craft consists of everything you've learned how to do and have internalized, but when you're actually doing it, the actions you take are both conscious and instinctive." 

"I've come to feel that creative writing programs are havens for people who like to read."

"We need to be careful about the argument that literature always enables empathy.  There are counter-examples: Josef Goebbels, that Nazi kingpin, wrote a novel.  Knut Hamsun was a great novelist and the most unpleasant major writer of the 20th center.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer, was a crazy anti-Semite.  Ezra Pound, another great writer, had, let us say, limited resources of empathy.  I could go on with this rogue's gallery.  Literature may enable empathy, but it often doesn't.  It can't turn monsters, even monsters of genius, into good people.  That's not the business of literature." 

"The downside to institutionalizing creative writing involves institutional bad faith: for the sake of enrollments, you may be encouraging people with little or no talent.  My impression is that physicists don't encourage people who can't do math, just for the sake of enrollments."

"Untalented writers may feel cheated and lied-to if they can't get published, if they don't have good lives as writers.  Which is why you have to tell everybody at the outset that no creative writing program can guarantee a career, or publications, or anything except for some close readings and guidance."

"Someone who gets to college without ever having loved a book is almost a hopeless case."

"You need to hit teens right between the eyes with a good book; they'll never get over it."

"The teaching of poetry has almost disappeared from the curricula of many English departments, and the AWP conferences have become a refuge for people who want to talk about poetry."

"The Interview Fallacy [is] the fraudulent claim that the artist always knew what he was doing and how he was doing it and can explain the whole business judiciously later when the fires of the work have cooled." (artist)

"The showbiz of the authorial appearance—the writer as carnival barker—is everywhere.  God help the writer who is unpresentable." (artist)

"We need a new sociology of literary studies, and we need it right now."

"Can you imagine William Faulkner [making a public appearance] in a bookstore?  He'd probably be blind drunk and would tell everyone to go fuck themselves."

"Readers love the sense of possibilities ... of hypothetical worlds that mimic and mirror our own.  Our actual lives have become fantastical in many respects, and the hybrid story of realism plus fantasy seems to be touching that tender spot."