Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

To read is to truly escape from oneself

You cannot become the greatest without at least a gr- and a test inside of you

The only person I compete with is Satan. If that happens to be you, then could you please move out of the way? You’re standing in Christ’s spot.

When religion becomes so involved in a future good "over yonder" that it forgets the present evils over here it is as dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned.

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

Some directors are like it's their... nothing can change, nothing can move. I like collaborating, even when an extra has an idea, I like to bring to really have collaboration.

There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didnt get you very far, because there werent too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldnt be both.

Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?

Misery makes sport to mock itself.