Poetry dovetails contradictions.

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.

May the Lord give us a new spirit and new heart

There was nothing better than the feel of a book in your hand, listening to the crinkling sounds as you turned its pages and the smell of its crisp paper.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.

We must not creep along when our souls cry out for us to soar!

Ownership and control is important, because if you don't own what you do, all sorts of stupid stuff happens to it, and people spend good money on garbage.

Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.

The heart never becomes wrinkled.

Swimming always cleans your soul

Take it and return it: the kiss of love.

Don't be limited by your job description.