"I went to the State University of New York at Binghamton and studied with the poet Milton Kessler. He gave me the best advice about my poems. He'd point to something in a poem that he thought was successful and he'd say, 'See that?' 'Yes,' I'd say. 'Well,' he'd say, '"do that again.'"
"All through college, I wrote for the school paper and even edited a humor magazine, for a while emulating a then-popular humor writer named Max Shulman. Junior year, with trepidation, I signed up for a creative writing course, which started my life of fiction despite the disasters of those early stories."
"I was always a good writer, but I didn't think I had an imagination. I liked pottery because I understood that if I just practiced over and over again, I could get a form just right...That's really how I started to feel comfortable writing poems -– by trying to attend to form...I think the forms gave me a space to work out what really was there in my imagination."
"...when I wrote fiction I was often unconscious about which part was from memory and which from imagination. For nonfiction, I tended to double check my memory, and I often turned to other sources to verify my memory. But if I found a conflict between a second source and my own memory, I might believe in myself more."
"...I believe to become a great writer or a very good one the writer must avoid organized teaching. I think like a shrink, a father, a lover, a mensch, but not as a writer. When I come to write, I go inward, very inward, and I allow my unconscious to blast through, often ooze, into awareness; that is how I write."
"When I think of sociologists who aspire to be writers, I think of W.E.B. DuBois, whose prose was quite good as we all know. But he was not a poet or a novelist. One day, I hope These Hands I Know will be recognized for what it is, an excellent primary source for people such as sociologists. The book gives a view to the effects of racism on black family life and the effects of child abuse."
"People I respect very much have liked the book. I sent two chapters to M.F.K. Fisher before she died, and she wrote me back a marvelous letter telling me she liked the writing very much. She said that she didn't like 99% of what had been written about Provence...'But Richard, you have broken the spell'."
"There's always been a natural relationship, even as a teenager wanting to be a composer, and playing at amateur symphonies, and later at professional symphonies and also playing jazz and accompanying singers, I always realized the words and the music were part of the whole."
"I was a pretty imaginative kid. But not Bizarro-inclined, per se. My life revolved around collecting and playing with Star Wars, G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe action figures and vehicles...Mostly, though, I liked to draw... My illustrations were ok, good for my age, but not great, and I was always better at mimicking somebody else's artwork than conceiving of and creating my own."
"The 3:15 Experiment is another organized "event" that I'm sure I will continue to do for the rest of my life...Since 1993, a shifting menagerie of poets has woken up at 3:15 AM each morning during the month of August to write...Right now, it's where the bulk of my poetry comes from because I don't write much poetry these days."