I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.