Happiness is a powerful thing. It freed me to do what I always wanted to do.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.

My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided with trying to be a little less or more, escaping who I was a minute ago?

As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.

I never feel more alone than when I'm traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet.

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison

There's a thread that binds all of us together pull one end of the thread the strain is felt all down the line.

I don't go by the rule book-I lead from the heart not the head.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

I like idiotic comedies.

Use your past as one of your mentors.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.