I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

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.

It takes one to tell, and two to missunderstand.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.

My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.

In Mars, we've been given a wonderful set of moons where we can send continuous numbers of people.

In addition, we will improve the Department of Defense's cyber capabilities. A new threat, a new problem, very expensive, and we're not doing very well with cyber.

Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

There was no answer, no solution, no sop, no deliverance. What, then, did I do? I read faster.

People can be induced to swallow anything, provided it is sufficiently seasoned with praise.

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

Every natural action is graceful.