The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Kill the fears before they endorse your failures. When you attempt to stop the terrorist at the time he's at work, you are too late!

People are too durable, that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long.

I might not be in a relationship anymore, but I don't believe that people should have to lie to themselves just to make somebody else feel good.

The Law is not the same at morning and at night.

No Alchymy to saving.

What I love about collaborating is that you're working with other minds that work differently to yours.

For my kids, I cook everything. We have dinner every night, pretty much, just the four of us: my husband and me and our two kids.

I've never signed a contract, so never have a deadline. A deadline's an unnerving thing. I just finish a book, and if the publisher doesn't like it, that's his privilege.

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Sometimes you do have to scare people a little bit: if someone is not acting in the best interest of the show, then maybe you need to scream and yell a little bit, or let them know you're in charge.