Poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.

Sometimes the whole world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful

Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows.

For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.

Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.

Sameness is what marketers want us to want.

Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.

A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.

Genius is an infinite capacity for pain.

Out of your comfort zone is the growth zone.

Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in.

Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

I don't read my reviews, I measure them.

Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.

I know that young people sometimes, caught up in the moment, make some very foolish decisions.

Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.