Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

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.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

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.

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

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