Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.

I have become an orchid washed in on the salt white beach. Memory, what can I make of it now that might please you- this life, already wasted and still strewn with miracles?

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In the end I would rather wonder than know

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.

a trauma that breaks you into brand new pieces.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

There'll always be that prep in me that I can't seem to get rid of.

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

There are a lot of things you can do with a law degree background, but I just didn't have a passion for it.

I'd like to work with David Lynch again.

When my boy arrived in this life, on this planet, it was completely a new dimension of experience for me and my wife. I'm still riding on the wave of that experience.

Programs to demonstrate Darwinian evolution are akin to a pinball machine. The steel ball bounces around differently every time but eventually falls down the little hole behind the flippers.

I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.