Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.