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

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.

We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.

A family is a mystery.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.