Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

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.

You don't earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.

Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.

Math teaches us chaos or order, for god sake?

People don't trust government, they don't trust Wall Street, they don't trust the church, they don't trust the media.

Artfulness is not simple entertainment, especially during upheaval, unleashing creative life is sacred duty.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

People who lusted after Marilyn Monroe had no idea she stuttered. It is the secret of her sexiness, actually.

Yes, women are homemakers - and the entire earth is our home. Yes, we are here to take care of the children - and every child in the world is one of our own.

The world is like a mirror; if you smile at it, it smiles at you. I love to smile, and so in general, I definitely receive smiles in return.

Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.