“I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene...” — Robert Morgan Quote

“I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.”

“I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.”

“Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.”

“Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.”

“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”

“I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.”

“I'm not an outdoor girl. I can barely swim. I don't ride a horse.”

“We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.”

“To be fair, I have no idea what my natural hair colour is any more - and I have no intention of finding out after 20 years of dedicated dyeing. I go to a local salon every few weeks to have my roots done when they have barely emerged.”

“As I recall, my life as a child was so all-consuming that I barely had time to consider the future.”

“When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.”

“During my time at Essex county fire and rescue service, barely a shift went by without receiving a call from an elderly person who had fallen in their home, or from their concerned neighbour or carer.”