David Attenborough, because he gets to do all the things with wildlife that I dream of.

My dad – he's the perfect gentleman.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – everything she writes speaks to me. Her Ted talk, We Should All Be Feminists, inspired everything I do with Gurls Talk.

Oprah – she's achieved so much.

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

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

And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely. Don’t trust priests of the postmodern religion of absolute playfulness.

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.

Yes, because it seems to me that poetry cannot be hermetically closed to thinking. And thinking always enters the field of contradiction. So it also has to do with the way I try to reconcile poetry versus thinking. … I think you’re right that for many American poets, poetry is almost an escape from the cruelty of thinking, from the choices you make when you think. Escaping your life—which may be tragic, but it’s not problematic. So I see it differently, as a necessity to confront these categories.

Why ardor? Because, I think, there’s not enough of it in our time. Or, at least in our literature. There’s too much lukewarm irony, too much sophisticated indulgence. The tragic dimension disappears in this intellectual environment. That’s why ardor is to be defended.