I change jobs like drinking water ... And as I grow accustomed to the new flavor of a drink I regard as delicious, yes, vital, something fades, life balks. So I break camp; I shed skins.

Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn't know how to talk or negotiate.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.