Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer

We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.