I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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.

To be sentenced to jail because of your faith in God is to let you know the degree of darkness in that particular society

We are not the passive victim of others' opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

Every honest miller has a golden thumb.

My music is a mix of everything, mostly my own life. I just write about things that mean something and that I can write about. There's no point in pretending.

I don't think of myself as pretty. I am what I am.

I just felt that if I went into Speed 2, I just... wouldn't have come up out of the water.

I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper.

I don't have any stigma attached to my body. When I'm in my own private space, I have very little on.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.