"The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last."

I’ve had people look down on me and put me down because I didn’t look like them—but that didn’t stop me.

To be a writer is to have a certain kind of sensitivity to the world, to be able to see what others do not see, to hear what others do not hear.

I have a sense of exile in thought, as if I were an alien.