Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

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

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

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.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

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