The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.