“Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.”

“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.”

“It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.”

“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”

“Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.”

“I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.”

“[H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes you a liar.”

“Love is honesty. Love is a mutual respect for one another.”

“The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isnt wrong, when you know exactly how much hes fought those...”

“There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.”

“I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.”

“Everybody's got a different sense of humor. It's just different styles.”