I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity as well as the inalienable right to govern himself with reason and justice.

You go through life wondering what is it all about but at the end of the day it's all about family.

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

The importance of 'Dream School' is monumental. Helping to inspire these students to reach their potential is personally gratifying.

Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.

I'm a believer that people need to understand that filmmaking is not a perfect process for anybody. It is a process in which you find the film and the film finds you. And that is every film.

The more people talk about eating disorders, the more people get the real story about what they're like.

Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.