Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

Love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things-and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.

There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you climb in bed and read for hours and hours, and the book itself is this charged magical object. Later, when writing becomes your job, it's tied up with ego and all kinds of worry, and it's not always easy to get to that state of pure escape.

Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad to still be a writer without remembering why, on some visceral, emotional level.