I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it..

It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors don't believe….

New York allows you to go deeper into the person you want to be. You're able to explore whatever your specific interests might be. You can eat good J….

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….

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..

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….

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

There is such a shelter in each other..

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….

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….

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….

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

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….

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….

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

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….

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

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….

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 ….

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….

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….