I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.

Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.