Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.