I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

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.

But love doesn't do what's easy. Love does what's necessary and right.

All of the young people - the artsy people, people who get overlooked because they're weird or they don't have hype around them - need to get some shine.

We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.

The patient says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that!"

Only a portion of my intestinal tract was working.

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

God does not want us to be living in the past, in shame, in fear, or in the future, in worry. He wants us to be living in the present, in now, with Him.

Most of God's people are contented to be saved from the hell that is without; they are not so anxious to be saved from the hell that is within.

Democracy does not have to be a bloodsport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.

Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.