"A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does."

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."

"Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet."

"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."

"The idea of trying to fight against extremism was written off as naive."

"My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people."

"For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination."

"On 'Into The Wild' I spent months risking my life and on 'Speed Racer' I spent 60 days acting in front of a green screen. No danger to my physical self, but I sure had to use my imagination."