I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

What writing does is to reveal.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.