I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

If you take care of someone, it does not mean that one should take care of you, someone other will be/has been sent by the God for you

Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.

The happy people are those who are producing something.

And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.

I didn't really play dress up when I was a kid, and I'm really T-shirt and jeans-y.

It is always a poor way of reading the hearts of others to try to conceal our own. [Fr., C'est toujours un mauvais moyen de lire dans le coeur des autres que d'affecter de cacher le sien.]

The older I've got, the easier I've found it to accept myself. I think I've finally learnt not to beat myself up so much.

The only thing I try to watch carefully is that I never lose the love for the instrument. That's also why I decided against a professional piano career when I was younger.

Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime.

But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.