Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

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.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

Seek grace and guidance from God.

First thing I do in the morning, after I have my breakfast and do my spiritual work, is put on my makeup and fix my hair, and I can do my makeup in 15 minutes.

My dad always said that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard enough.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

For a machine to run smoothly and predictably, its parts must be standard and hence replaceable, features which contribute, respectively, to modern depersonalization and anxiety.

Those who are dead are not dead They're just living in my head.

Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.

When one guy sees an invisible man he's a nut case; ten people see him it's a cult; ten million people see him it's a respected religion.

It was a positive sign that the conversation took place, it's a sign of the depth of the friendship between Australia and Indonesia.