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.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Endeavor to do what you love so that your work becomes an expression of love to the world

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

The best legacy we leave is not for our children but in our children.

Perhaps my children will live in stone houses and walled towns - Not I

I did not know that we had ever quarreled.

Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.

I just like to switch things up all the time. Like when it comes to singing, I try to find a different character for each song.

Richard Jenkins read the script [The Hollars] and really liked it, but he said, 'If you can get Margo Martindale, I'll do it. Otherwise, good luck.