I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Your inner light lights up your outer world.

Life gives only the canvas, but it is you, who chooses the colors.

I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name.

I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so why do I feel so bad?

Sanctification is the process in which we become more aware of how sinful we are.

When has stand-up comedy been kind to anyone? It goes after anyone who's the target. Comedy attacks, man.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify.