The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

The deepest fear we have, 'the fear beneath all fears, ' is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It's this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.

Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person's life.

If you count your chickens before theyve hatched, they wont lay an egg.

God didn’t want me to do more for Him. He wanted me to be more with Him.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story and all kinds of sonic goodness.

Mummies are dehydrated & they long for the blood of living words.

When women and girls rise, their communities and their countries rise with them

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

If the Cubs were to win (The World Series) it would be a coronary event for me.