One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

A family is a mystery.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.