Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.