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

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

I love playing a villain. I think that there's something freeing about that, and it's a different kind of challenge.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

I think I have a natural, if I can say that, got a kind of natural ability in comedy.

Sometimes I think we're exposed to things we shouldn't be exposed to too early. I think that sets the tone to a person's whole life. Trauma.