For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

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.

If you are too good to look after God’s trash, you are not good enough to look after God’s treasure.

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

Acting is everything to me; it's what I've always wanted to do. I may never have this chance to do what I'm doing right now. So I guess right now I'm going to do as much as I can with it.

2001 King of the Ring? I really like the sound of that! That REEKS OF ROYALTY! So begins the ERA OF AWESOMENESS!

I expect to get paid if I do something.

A church that likes power likes prayer.

I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone.

When even one virtue becomes our nature, the mind becomes clean and tranquil. Then there is no need to practice meditation; we will automatically be meditating always. (151)

The older you get, the more comfortable you become with yourself, and you accept what you have physically.