I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.

I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

One needs to be on guard against expecting external powers to decide when you can take yourself seriously as an artist. It can be a long wait - and lead to endless appetite.

I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.

I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.