If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.

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

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.

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

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.