There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.