Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.