Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

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.

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.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

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.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.