Fate is like a train. When it flies past, you can choose if you want to get on it or not, to say no or say yes.

The problems I had with the Paris Opera Ballet are a thing of the past.

Dancers should realise that they are really lucky. Dancing is not a job. It's people who are chosen. And you must realise that you are chosen. Sometimes I see a performance that makes me really angry - I think, 'Those people are lucky, and they don't realise it.'

I had no sense of having reached some goal because I was an etoile at the Paris Opera. My ambition, if you can call it that, was to discover and learn and be excited by what I was doing. If I didn't have that, I would find it elsewhere.

There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.

Mum and Dad had high expectations of us as human beings - it wasn't just about education. It's a fantastic way to go about parenting, and I aspire to that.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

In America, you can't say to your family, 'Hey, I'm off to L.A. to make it as a songwriter; sorry I can't pay for the dentist.'