But a running theme has been how many men have said something along the lines of, “Wow, I was so surprised I loved your book, because I’m a man.” These men mean no harm—I don’t take those comments personally—and yet the fact that they were surprised that they loved a book by and about a woman is an indication of the sexism women writers are up against every time they write.

I feel we are in danger of vanilla-fying and perfecting and asphalting over the thing that makes us human, which are our fallibility, our mess, and our inaccuracy, all of which creates the tension, ... .

My big idea is to marry affordability and access to ensure that we leverage innovation to develop affordable, cutting-edge therapies for chronic diseases.

There is no king of golf. Never has been, never will be. Golf is the most democratic game on Earth. It punishes and exalts us all with splendid equal opportunity.

Happiness springs from having found a form of expression that also earns recognition.

I loved Brodsky; I admired him. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with him, and I know he liked me, too. It was a friendship. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do.

But it seems to me that I’m somebody who is deeply skeptical and trying to combat this skepticism. So my writing is probably situated somewhere between the poles of skepticism and ecstasy, with my dream being to have more ecstatic poems.

This is not an easy question—there are many poets who are my masters. Sometimes I find a poet whose one poem speaks to me with a great force, for instance Giorgios Seferis with his “The King of Asine”, a poem that sheds light on the spiritual situation of contemporary Greek (maybe not only Greek) poetry. ... Yeats with many poems, among them the incredible “Sailing to Byzantium”; a strange poem in the sense that it’s hard to believe Yeats would find in the real Byzantium these miracles of intellect he was longing for. Montale with many poems, with his constant looking for an instant of revelation and enjoying all the impediments, all the obstacles on this road. Mandel'štam who was able to blend a tragic vision of life with a strong sense of humor and a wonderful concreteness of images.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.