Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

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.

Live now, die later!

our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.

Through my education, I didn't just develop skills, I didn't just develop the ability to learn, but I developed confidence.

When you first start to practice positive thinking, tell no one, go to it realistically, stop dwelling on your difficulties, your sorrows. Radiate the happiness you reall want in your life.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

Like the seasons of the year, life changes frequently and drastically. You enjoy it or endure it as it comes and goes, as it ebbs and flows.

The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

Nothing could be easier than disturbing a status quo instituted by others; the real work of the sinister current is to break the rules we rigidly establish for ourselves.