Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

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

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.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.