“The traffic, however, was usually the other way.”

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now?

Teaching and writing have tended to proceed on parallel lines, but there have been times when there was indeed carry-over from the classroom to the creative work.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word “myth” only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn to a poem like Casualty in Field Work.

With luck, a writer capable of producing both Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb will not remain unappreciated for long.

The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore.

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.

But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in ‘Rio Bravo’.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

However, I don’t think I’m as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people – which is why I think I did so well.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’