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

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

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.

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.