With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

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.

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.

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.

Don't ask for directions if you're not going to start the car.

Make not the scars of yesterdayMake you bitter todayYesterday has passedAnd like water in a river once passed Can never be returnedThe KhoiSan Book of Wisdom

if you care, let those people knowif you don't, then make sure those people know.

Just like New Yorkers themselves, the trees in New York [city] work harder than any others in the world.

Creativity stands at the center of all education.

One must always be careful of books.

My brother went on to have a long and sordid career.

No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

It is time we Georgians did not depend only on others, it is time we asked what Georgia will do for the world.