I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy.

The real world has consequences when you do and say things about others. We're at a point now where you better be sure who you're going after.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.

Loving dogs is a question of anthropomorphism. We become attached to dogs because of the feelings we project on them.

I threw a lot of balls and walked a lot of batters. Not something I'm proud of, but something I learned from.

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.