I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.

Whenever you have an ex, and they're like, 'I hope we can still be friends!' and you weren't friends before you started dating, then what do you go back to, really?

I need my food to keep my energy up, so I can't really diet.

If you were in a bad relationship and you meet someone new, you're going to leave with your luggage. The next person is going to have to endure things that someone else causes.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.

A Christian high school is just like any other high school in the sense of the politics and all of these levels of who's cool and what to wear.

I hate a conscience. It's always making you feel low down and disreputable. I don't believe I will say anything to my children about one, and let them have some peace.

It really hit home that my parents felt as though they didn't have to worry anymore. They realized if you could win an Oscar, that was a good sign.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.