And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.

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.

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

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.

Not once in her life had Darcy wanted to thumb her nose at danger and rip the clothes off a man, but she was contemplating that very thing.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. ... Providence appears to protect such women maybe out of astonishment.

The Olympic Games must not be an end in itself, they must be a means of creating a vast programme of physical education and sports competitions for all young people.

Where hast thou wandered, gentle gale, to find the perfumes thou dost bring?

You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don't need to do that any more.

We should all learn to take things easily - other people's things.

I've paid for more pianos in hotel lobbies than you can imagine.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

The things that change people's lives are usually an accumulation of small acts.