You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.