I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

New York allows you to go deeper into the person you want to be. You're able to explore whatever your specific interests might be. You can eat good Japanese food if you want to eat good Japanese food. You can go and see your favorite author reading, and you can still listen to Radio Ulster on the internet as you have your breakfast. I love that.

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.