“Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult. ”

“I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.”

“Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.”

“If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.”

“I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in theresolution of doubts but in their proliferation”

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”

“The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.”