Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

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 most important thing that a human must do in order to maintain good health is to be aware of the environment that they grew up in and to keep it throughout life.

A smile costs about $240.

For good is simple, evil manifold.

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

I get a lot of abuse on Twitter. It's mostly homophobic, but what can you do? I just either ignore it or laugh.

God interrupt whatever we are doing so that we can join You in what You're doing

It is the fool who is haunted by fears, dread of dangers, oppression of mind, not the wise man.

So act that anything you do may become universal law.

When nobody speaks your name, or even knows it, you, knowing it, must be the first to speak it.

There's nothing in the world so sad as talking to a man who never knew his life was his for making.