I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

I was feeling like I was floating two inches above the sidewalk every step of the way. Feeling, almost, a magnetic pull back towards her and I wondered at all, if she felt it too.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

My philosophy is to always find the smartest people you can. Hire people smarter than you.

I don't get embarrassed easily, and I do silly things all the time!

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

Sometimes you have to be selfish to get what you want and move forward in life.

Mapping out your own future in the form of images, phrases, and inspirational words that you are able to see every day will help reinforce your desires to attain what you set out to achieve.