There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.