At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

She had been trying hourly to ensure that this new friendship remained such, to be certain that it would not slip out of the careful grasp of her fingers and into the darker champers of her heart.

It is impossible to find peace in the world if we can't create peace within ourselves.

Break break break On thy cold gray stones O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.

Once Playboy came to me, all the preachers ran. I needed to pose in Playboy to make money.

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

Make whatever decision you wish but never forget one thing: all of you are much better than you believed. Take advantage of the chance that tragedy has given you; not everyone is capable of doing so

There has to be a beginning somewhere and my thing is that I am going to give it all I got.

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.