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

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.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.

Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

When you're interviewing someone, you're in control. When you're being interviewed, you think you're in control, but you're not.

Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

Well folks, what do you think? Here's our choices.. Should I give Paul Bearer back to Kane? Should I shove Paul Bearer down these steps?

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.

It's impossible to consider myself a producer. I can barely produce an English muffin, in the morning.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

We do not sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.