[On filling out a grant application:] I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.

If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.

Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.

I like to read because it kills me.

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.