I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.