The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.

He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn't have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips

("Let's stand under a tree," she said. "Why?" "Because it's nicer." "Maybe you should sit on a chair, and I'll stand above you, like they always do with husbands and wives." "That's stupid." "Why's it stupid?" "Because we're not married." "Should we hold hands?" "We can't." "But why?" "Because, people will know." "Know what?" "About us." "So what if they know?" "It's better when it's a secret." "Why?" "So no one can take it from us.")