I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

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.

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.

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.

It was like diving into winter waves. "I can't, " I told him."Why not?""Because I need to find out who I am by myself before I can be with anyone else.

The offspring of virtue is perseverance. The fruit and offspring of perseverance is habit and child of habit is character.

Irrationality is the exclusive preserve of humans as among all creatures only we have the power to rationalise, that being the art of packaging patently irrational as apparently rational.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

I fought windmills with such heavy weapons that I risked dislocating my arm.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span, Because to laugh is proper to the man.

You know, it was just another presentation of my work, and a funny one, because the cards are quite different from the normal Tarot deck, no?

Compassion is a quality which impels one to perform sacrifices.

Tact is the art of convincing people that they know more than you do.