Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

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 God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.

I certainly was a geeky kid myself, but to me, math and science were always these magical things- powerful tools you could use in incredible ways.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself.

I'm learning all the right vocabulary words - 'You're right, I'm wrong.'

Every thought, word, or deed, either purifies or pollutes the body.

We want to destroy each other by making the other fall in love with us.

Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.

Every nuclear bomb is an Auschwitz waiting to happen.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.