A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I dream of a true husband—a good man, not a brute, nor a champion of men on the battlefield; I dream but of a gentle man, one who neither speaks too loud nor ignores evil.

I'm not white, I don't apologize for what my country did to become great

The vivacity that augments with years is not far from folly.

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

We believe trial judges confronted with disruptive, contumacious, stubbornly defiant defendants must be given sufficient discretion to meet the circumstances in each case.

I still have a lot my Disney store art left and if I ever run out I'll just redraw it, because it will still be my original art and as a freelancer I own it.

Since I tend to write chronologically, the middle is always the place where the process is most taxing.

Pete Rose is too rich a character to fit on a bronze plaque. He requires a good, trenchant, poignant (ah, Petey) book, and this is it.

Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.

I don't feel I was "born American," but my homeland was denied to me after the end of World War II and I craved something I could identify with.