Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.

I have no concern with widening audience.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

I preferred the simplest vocabulary.

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.