I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Liu pulled her behind him

It comes down to having fun and doing what I love.

We're not locked in to these conditions that degrade the environment, and jeopardize the future of our children.

The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

Why would anybody lie? The truth is always more colourful.

Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.

It's clear that other problems such as [...] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

In any society, the way a woman gives birth and the kind of care given to her and the baby points as sharply as an arrowhead to the key values of the culture.

In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.