I don't smoke because I like to do so, but because it makes me pay cigarette taxes, which helps build roads and water supplies.

You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk-away from any open flames-to remind yourself that if you don't write daily, you will get rusty.

One day we will all cherish the memory of having blacksmiths on every corner.

There's a ton of truth in Flannery O'Connor's notion that "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."

I have to deal with seven ex-stray dogs, and one ex-stray cat. One dog is nearing nineteen years old. Before I go to teach, he likes for me to tell him bedtime stories.

Don't try to outguess what's going on in publishing, and write what you want to write.

Gilles Deleuze believed that every society needed a madman so we could feel better about ourselves. I do my best to fill that role.

Think about all the selfish non-smokers out there, driving around on asphalt, drinking water out of the tap, not even thinking about how smokers' taxes help pay for it all.

We find new strength in every battle won.

Don’t waste time waiting for opportunity to surface

Please, please don't try hurting me, my friends.I wouldn't forgive myself If I had to kill you all.

Even the most honest human in authority often does not have the power to undo the damages that bad people do.

The more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we've never had to make before about life, about death, about parenting.

Let go of everything. That is how you get everything; you let go of everything.

What happened to the good old days of "Woman as passive recipient?" What happened to being courted? What happened to sitting back under a parasol and granting someone a chance to try to win us over?

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.