I think it's more important to concentrate on trying to be, simply, happy. Once you've known deep despair, you feel even more motivated to be as happy as possible. That's how I feel.

The most precious love is often the kind that isn't returned, and that is given freely.

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.

I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.

I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.

It's terrible to know that no matter how you try to help your child, his condition will worsen.

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in that chaotic reality, and also this: that none of us knows anything about anything. Period.

People romanticize, I think, this notion of life. But life at all costs is not life, it's ego-extension.

I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.

I do believe that great love brings with it the terror and possibility of great loss.

He didn't marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.

Cheapen words and they'll cheapen you

Literature is language charged with meaning

You can't draw lines in the sand like that. Humour's a tsunami that doesn't care about your little lines.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.

You can’t trap justice. It’s an idea, a belief.

I think that when you look at a guy like Luke Harper you can see that he does in fact smell.

Morality in Europe today is herd-morality

How can you be more subject; black woman in a white man's world?