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.

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.

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

My mother's gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.

Use what you have got to create your world.

Every salad you serve is a picture you have painted, a sculpture you have modeled, a drama you have created.

Make this moment magnificent!

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

It's great working with my sister, because we are very close as a family - my brother, my sister and myself. We have a great relationship.

Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!

When you have seven percent unemployed, you have ninety-three percent working.

Either I'll never get rich from the show but remain intensely proud of the work and stand behind every second of it, or it catches on and I'll make my money down the road.

I hate thinking about what I'm doing. I wish I didn't think about it at all.