I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.

When I played baseball I got death threats all the time--from my mother.

I did Noise Music because I genuinely liked noise... But a lot of people didn't. At my concerts, people smashed beer glasses in my face.

Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen.

The difference between the men and the boys in politics is, and always has been , that the boys want to be something, while the men want to do something.

It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave.

Don't raise your expectations too high. It's the surest way of being disappointed.

Martin O'Neill, standing, hands on hips, stroking his chin.

Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.

The world does not need sermons; it needs a message. You can go to seminary and learn how to preach sermons, but you will have to go to God to get messages.