When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

There is such a shelter in each other.

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."