I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Success has more to do with what you are willing to sacrifice than your skills, talent or IQ.

No one's ever really ready for a troll.

Some people are like egg. The more you apply heat to them, the harder they become. To hatch them, just use a gentle heat, and to keep them alive, just keep them cool.

Apparently I’ve been typecast in science fiction: I’m a Russian bisexual telepathic Jew.

This is our Lord's will... that our prayer and our trust be, alike, large.

I use hate as a weapon to defend myself; had I been strong, I would never have needed that kind of weapon.

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.

Life I love you, all is groovy.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.