I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

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.

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.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

We must stop calling corruption a “Nigerian factor”.

All movies aren't fun some are hard work. You try to do something and convey a set of emotions that have to do with some real life kind of stuff.

Sorrow eats your heart and courage.

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

I was involved as deputy mayor in New York City on 9/11.

The difficulty of being a Latin kid, a Latin man in this country [U.S].

The movies helped define how I should be as a person.

It is up to man to be an angel or a devil! You become whatever you choose to be!

I always think that the party that offers the most hope and ideas for the future is the party that wins.