When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.