"For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry."

"We simply have not kept in touch with poetry."

"One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way."

"The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives."

"Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style."

"Life is short, the art long."

"Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology."

"Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued Olympia had bagels! We didn't have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me - a place with so many vegetarians, the restaurants made special dishes for them?"