i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

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.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Learn how to learn...then start learning

Shake off the tonnage of old genetics, nitpicking naysayers and hand-me-down Egos hoarding junk in the back of your mind.Be a Friday night liberty set loose on Monday morning.

He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.

Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.

One thing that prevents a man from being a good father is he hasn't completed being a boy.

My design is organic, I don't control architecture, I grow it

Of all religious systems, Islam alone declares that individual perfection is possible in our earthly existence.

A president can ask for reconciliation in the racial conflict that divides Americans. But reconciliation comes only from the hearts of people.

Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.