At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

One does not become a guru by accident.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

Impossibility is possible till it becomes impossible

Stop inviting people who don't celebrate you to your party! It's YOUR life - you have the right to be exclusive.

Few find success without hard work and determination. Those who do have hardly gained anything for themselves that they deserve.

I miss friends and family. If it weren't for visits from old friends and other African Americans I meet who come to Cuba, I'd probably be in some kind of time warp.

It would be a foetus of monarchy!

Neither my husband nor I am interested in mincing words. If I break something, for example, I have to announce it. I'm a compulsive confessor.

I never think about franchises, to be honest. I always just do the film.

I was really young, but I can't say that I wrote much of anything. I liked to scribble; I thought of it as that. But I was playing guitar and ukulele when I was in second grade.

It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China's occupation of Tibet.

I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?