To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.

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.

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.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now