As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

A review is a double-edged sword. It will either get people interested, or it might drive people away before they even click "buy".

How very different it would be to live somewhere where people weren't afraid to reveal themselves, where emotion was prized instead of hidden.

But the heaviest things, I think, are the secrets. They can drown you if you let them.

[With Photosynth,] all of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts.

All there really is to do now, is to be in the present Moment.

Dreams as soul messages...each nightly communication brings the latest-breaking news available in special edition just for you!

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

My wife and I are art collectors and architectural crazies.

Remember the importance of phrases... a piece of something, an entry, a moment, a mark. This adjusts the pressure of the giant task of creating the perfect masterwork.

Repentance is like antiseptic. You pour antiseptic onto a wound and, at first, it stings. Then it heals.