Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.

A writer must say yes to life.

All of us can create if we allow ourselves to.

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.