The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it a….

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more ….

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult..

If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would never really consider yo….

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are….

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art….

Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in rela….

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get olde….

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that so….

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way..

There is such a shelter in each other..

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's l….

Publishing a book is a great thing, and I'm grateful, but it's also a horrible, exposing thing. Once you've published a book, you never write quite a….

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see..

Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always b….

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enig….

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out.".

Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and….

You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books..

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity..

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is goi….