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 pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

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

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