I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

Here, in memory, we live and die.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.