I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

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.

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

Whatever makes a man a beast also renders him pitiable. But it behoves us to be wary of these besti*l men despite our compassion, for they frequently turn on their friends.

Learn from yesterday, live for today.

The Law is supposed to keep us safe and strong and able to birth healthy children, yet the Law wants us to tear each other apart to find a leader. The Law's a bunch of hypocrisy.

I don't want to be anything else other than what I am. I can say that with passion. No regrets.

If you're a person who says yes most of the time, you'll find yourself in the hotel business and the restaurant business.

If there's a reason for the way that life is I'd like to find it. After all, who's life is it?

Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.

It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.

I'm vain. My arms are thin, but I'm vain about loose flesh. And so I'm careful that what I wear will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.

The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.