I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

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.

I dwell on great thoughts.

I am consumed by love.

Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.

Right, yeah, you know, my favorite thing just globally about music is just hopefully I'm able to be, you know, blessing the people in any way that I can.

We have met the Alien and it is us.

Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling.

Most places in the Midwest, you ski on piles of trash, like retired landfills.

Each human being has his own sexual profile, and should exercise it without guilt - provided he does not oblige others to exercise it with him.

A man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - never likely to reach home port. To us comes the signal: chart your course, set your sail, position your rudder, and proceed.