This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

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.

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

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.