For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

These are the moments for which we live.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.