"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."

"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."

"Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it."

"I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years."

"Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will."

"In fact, allowing immigrants to have licenses actually improves homeland security by allowing our government to track who is in our borders."

"Vanity, like murder, will out."

"A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being."