Every poem, formal or free, has an ideal shape, and the job of the poet is to find it.

If you're hooked on the physical act of writing, there's a good chance of your hanging in there long enough to say what you were born to say.

The trick is, to treat your days as if each one may be your last.

Every road leads somewhere. The challenge is to pick the right road and then to stay on it.

Religion is about hospitality and responsibility, and about neighbor/enemy-love-as-self-love in a Christian term that requires one to turn a new _gaze_ onto others––what I call a _cosmopolitan gaze_.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

Never does a person feel so wise, so mature and so adult as when she is not.

In other words apart from the known and the unknown what else is there?

You must be a starter and a finisher, the slogan “press on” has solved a lot of problem.

Live Aid did feel like one hour's rehearsal after several years, but to be part of Live Aid was wonderful. It reall was.

A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.

I was not popular enough - or at all - when Vanilla Ice was popular to remember who Vanilla Ice is without my husband reminding me. So I don't have a Vanilla Ice key chain.

Simply cutting the taxes for America's wealthiest families is clearly not creating the needed new jobs, and that strategy is unlikely to succeed in the future.