Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

- Mary Jo Salter

Money is that dear thing which, if you're not careful, you can squander your whole life thinking of.

- Mary Jo Salter

The one concession I've made as I've gotten older is that my children are now adults and they're in their twenties and thirties and so I'm careful ab…

- Mary Jo Salter

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

- Mary Jo Salter

As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conv…

- Mary Jo Salter

Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an edito…

- Mary Jo Salter

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come fr…

- Mary Jo Salter

All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that's in their heads; we're going to ge…

- Mary Jo Salter

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.

- Mary Jo Salter