I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!