Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey.

I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

We [ with Andy Samberg] knew each other for the last few years, our names are similar, our looks are a little bit similar, and our backgrounds are similar. The Judaism is quite similar.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

I didn't want my music to be confused - even though I was and had a lot of questions. I wanted my music to capture a period in my life where I was sure.

They might see that you are going to meet a beautiful woman or a beautiful man. They will come to you in dreams and tell you this is going to happen because of them.

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.

He snarled at me. "This isn't over yet, Betsy." "Excellent," I said. "I would also have accepted 'You haven't seen the last of me' and 'You'll regret this'.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.