Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

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.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone.

I have a huge ego and a huge inferiority complex at the same time.

We've never done a coordinated music effort. Everything else we've done has been around a holiday - Halloween, Mardi Gras, half way to Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day.

I am definitely as happy as I've ever been. Happier, I would say, than I've ever been.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.

You don't have to be pretty for people to come and see you play. At the same time, if you're a good athlete, it doesn't mean you're not a woman.

For a while, after the Second World War, when there was strong support for labor, this was done subtly.

There are so many women out there relying on me to represent them.