A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

A good husband makes a good wife.

I never miss reality when I'm not in it, but it's sometimes nice to come back to.

Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere.

If somebody wants to shoot up and die in front of you, more power to them. The herd has a way of thinning itself out.

If I fall, look out for the crash. There won't be anyone left standing.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

I didn't come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it's sickening.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

It would be contrary to the spirit of the American Government to use force to subjugate the South.