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.

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.