What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.

I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

I remember when I was writing my memoir and I was worried about what other people would think when they read it, and my mother, who can be this incredibly wise person, said that it really didn't matter because strangers who read it would never meet me anyway, and people I knew were aware of my secrets.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit. As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.