Bruce Smith is a tender master of music, and beautiful lines, and complex thoughts, and fascinating wild personal and cultural references.

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

I feel that my job, as an artist, is to disturb the peace. And to disturb it intellectually, linguistically, politically and literally.

I have left out what I don't remember or don't know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness.

Sometimes a person thinks he's attached to one thing and he's really attached to something else.

The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

There are hundreds of prisons - sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus.

It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

I've been active in a minor way compared to professional activists. I was a labor leader. I led two labor strikes. I've manipulated boards. I've led marches. I've done many things.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

I didn't come up with the lie. It wasn't mine. They handed the lie to me, and I tried like hell to make it work for a while.

To stuck in the comfort zone is to never find out what you are capable of.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

There are only three things we 'have to' do in this world we have to be born, we have to die, and we have to live until we die. Everything else is a choice!

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

The evolution of the sport is so fast, if you slow down for a second, you're past.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

I have no secret methods. I know no diplomacy save that of truth. I have no weapon but non-violence.

I'm in the collard green 6 cornbread in the guts Got the Halloween kicks trick or treat in the clutch

A path to citizenship for those who are here illegally in my view is unfair to those waiting sometimes a decades in line to come here.