I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.