I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

It is one thing to follow God's way of service if you are regarded as a hero, but quite another thing if the road marked out for you by God requires becoming a 'doormat' under other people's feet.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

You and your opponent are one. There is a coexisting relationship between you. You coexist with your opponent and become his complement, absorbing his attack and using his force to overcome him.

A lot of people provide me with quotes. They suggest all kinds of things to say and I do, really, because I'm not very hip at all.

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

An actor wants to get up every day and they can't think of anything particularly more fun to do than getting into a made-up situation and living it out as if it's real.

Swimming always cleans your soul

No other formula gives your baby a better start in life except that stuff that comes out of you for free.

I believe my friends and neighbors there are misguided. I think they are not going to get what they hoped for. But they feel betrayed by the Democratic and Republican establishment.