For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman’s singing and about Bizet’s Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.