We stayed in some pretty shabby places in Europe.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

Everything has added up to a load that I'm getting tired of carrying. It's gotten so complicated. It's the three failed marriages, and having kids that grew up without me, and it's the personal criticism, of being Mr. Nice Guy, or of divorcing my wife by fax, all that stuff, the journalism, some of which I find insulting.

[In Europe,] there seems to be much more ambivalence ... about whether there are elite places.

My competitive juices are starting to flow again. There are only two places that I'd ever want to go if I did it again ... that's New York and in Boston.

Usually, over the years, I manage to keep the closer pretty well spread out, ... That's not been the case this year.