I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

The writing of a poem is, for me, in the first place, an almost total act of abandon leading to discovery leading to recognition.

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

A nation's art is the expression of its soul.

Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.

I speak to you in one tongue/ but every moment that ever mattered to me/ occurred in another language.

Writing is painting for the imagination!

She thinks I'm a hussy, ' thought Scarlett. 'And perhaps she's right at that!

Please stop sniffing the robot boy, Noemi tells herself, jerking out of the trance.

She didn't need to go to acting school to learn that the essence of acting is to act like you're not acting.

I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !

I know how to play my guard spot, ... He can worry about the low post.

When you stop knowing your kids' business and who they're hanging out with, you have stopped parenting.

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It's just the universe breathing.

When told by a helpful aide that his flies were undone he replied 'Young man, there is no harm in leaving the cage door open if the bird is dead!