You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

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.

When there is no argument [dispute] over a talk, it is called ‘Principle’.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

The world has plenty of room, riches, money and beauty ... Let us begin by dividing it more fairly.

See the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions.

I feel strangely normal.

Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.

Every director is completely different.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.