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.

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.

Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something

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.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.