But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.

If you want a studio to back you, you want to be doing something that's been done to death!

The two most mysterious things in our lives are birth and death. They are both miraculous events; one brings shiny, brand new life into the world, and the other snuffs it out like that. That person isn't there anymore.

Africa needs more funding to continue to fight all of those diseases. We are losing more than 1.3 million young children under the age of five every year because of malaria. We've already lost 25 million people to the pandemic of HIV-AIDS. More people are dying now from typhoid fever. Diabetes is on the rise.