I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.