A family is a mystery.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

I will build the best Potemkin village for you, my love!

What we're trying to do is address something I saw in Congress that was a major problem, which is to say that energy is arguably the most fundamental issue confronting our country.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

As the character changes in the movie, it rubs off on the viewer, so the viewer also goes through that change.

In a fallen world, if you demand perfection or nothing, you will always get nothing.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease.

My parents raised me to never feel like I was entitled to success.That you have to work for it. You have to work so hard for it. And sometimes then you don't even get where you need to go.

Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.