You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

One of the reasons I like immersing myself in different texts, putting myself in the company of other writers, is that they do change your vocabulary. They change what you write about or they change the length of lines.

Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."