One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.

If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way of your own cause.

My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.

I've seen women who don't have great relationships with their dads, and it all comes down to this: You have to tell girls you love them every day.

Like most New Yorkers I was shell-shocked immediately after 9/11 and couldn't put into words what I was feeling.

Offers dried up after a few years and it was like I had fallen off the radar.

My friends say everything I touch turns to gold. I'll say, 'I've been very lucky.

The Loved One has been the most underrated film I've worked on.

True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

I hate to see the evening sun go down.