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.

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.

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.

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

We're all entitled to our different likes and dislikes. Imagine the world if we all liked the same things.

My No. 1 priority, and it always has been this, is keeping our team together and making sure we have the right guys in the right positions to make a run at this for a long time.

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

There are no mistakes in life, and it's not about anybody being able to judge you.

Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.

Adore God, abhor sin.

Peace is a stranger to the rigid mind. Peace is a guest of the flexible heart.

Night's candles have burned out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops." Hope tinged with melancholy - like life.