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.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

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

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.