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.

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.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

If you do what you love, it is the best way to relax.

Even in Kitty Kelley's book, which is so negative, they talk about, as with all first ladies, that Nancy Reagan is constantly around to take photo ops with kids.

One act of violence takes four generations to heal.

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was up early watching television and watched the announcement. I didn't understand what the word 'assassinated' meant.

Aww don't feel noways tired. I've come too faarrrrr from where I started frum.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the recognition that some things are more important than fear - and what's more important to me is faith.

So many of us know what we are against, but not what we are for-what we disbelieve, not what we believe. A negative life easily becomes neutral and futile.

I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums.

Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.

The singing tells everybody what to do musically.