“English has more flexibility. It’s a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.”

“What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.”

“I write novels quickly, which is not my reputation.”

“I’ve cultivated the first-person style as opposed to the third person. It’s a problem. A really good novelist is able to write in the third person, but I have never been able to write well in the third person.”

“To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long.”

“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.”

Today, as you may know, is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov’s death. There won’t be parades, but there will be an abundance of talk, mainly on NPR, about his most famous novel Lolita or his penchant for bu…

How effective is it to use literature to seduce men? So maybe it wasn’t fair to invite him to the lecture I was giving on The Great Gatsby and then use it as a chance to get back at him. After all, I’m a writing teacher and a student of literatu…