I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Samyak buddhi (right intellect) is that which shows things as they are.

I have decided on my destiny

But what she feels is sometimes hard to express...Much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without.

Always bet on the underdog. They've got ambition and nothing to lose.

But, slavery is good for some people! ! ! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.

Believe it or not, I was just given an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Tennessee.

I'm actually in my 22-year-old son Jason's band, After Midnight Project. The music is like Coldplay-ish rock.

Bring me coffee before I turn into a goat!

Ten thousand years as Intercontinental Champion, Oooooh yeeeah!