Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.

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.

Rights’ are ‘privileges, ’ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.

We want to live and love and build a just and peaceful society.

I want to be my usual painstaking, cautious, slow, conservative self in analyzing it.

I love 'Breathe' with Taylor (Swift) but I've been performing 'Lucky' with Jason (MRaz) all over the world in the past year so I'm glad that's what won.

To all those Bernie Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms.

All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion.

No golfer can ever become too good to practice.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.