It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.

My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.

Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.

I like books that are fat and full.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.