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.

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.

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.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

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

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

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.