I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

The light can only shine in the darkness.

Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting

I'm an activist. I'm a proud activist. So I want to be someone who is pro-black and pro-Africa and still be somebody that has positive influence.

I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.

If I could play any character from the book though it’d be Church. Who wouldn’t want to be a cat?!

You can take this as a gentle word of warning, if you like. We are just at the beginning of a period of more intensive antitrust enforcement.

Abject poverty is demeaning, is an assault on the dignity of those that suffer it. In the end it demeans us all. It makes the freedom of all of us less meaningful.

Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.