I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

When your soulmate cries your heart weeps.

One of the most important things a man must bear in mind is this very thing - that he owes his fellow a transforming encounter.

There’s a dignity in consequences.

Honey, I can smell the scent of another woman from 500 paces.

-tomorrow is our permanent address and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do, we’ll move away still further:into now

But most is all to do with work. There are aspects of work that are enjoyable, that you could call a hobby.

(on Warner Brothers) This studio has more suspensions than the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sometimes I hear people talk about discipline of self and I think, if you don't have passion, I might discipline myself for a week or two but only passion will hold me steady.

There is only one river. There is only one sea. And it flows through you, and it flows through me. There is only one people. We are one and the same. We are all one spirit. We are all one name.

I make figurative portraits as a way to explore theories of quantum physics.