But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Write the poem only you can write.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

Never give advice in a crowd.

When people wear shoes that don't fit them, it says something about their soul. Generally, I think it means they are good people.

I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.

The independent girl is a person before whose wrath only the most rash dare stand, and, they, it must be confessed, with much fear and trembling.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

He who would foresee what is to happen should look to what has happened: for all that is has its counterpart in time past.

Never underestimate the power of wide-grip pull-ups to develop width and size.

Some fell by laudanum, and some by steel, and death in ambush lay in every pill.