Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.

A man of the utmost insignificance.

The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

We are slumberous poppies, Lords of Lethe downs, Some awake and some asleep, Sleeping in our crowns. What perchance our dreams may know, Let our serious may know.

What would aliens say when told earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight?

Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life.

Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.