I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I am this space my body believes in.

I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I think of language as our first music.

I said that love heals from inside.

The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.

We can have anything we want on life, if we just help others to found what they need

After our honeymoon I felt like a new man. She said she did too.

Even the cry from the depths is an affirmation: Why cry if there is no hint or hope of hearing?

I didn't think before that I'd done enough to justify publishing an autobiography but after 40 years in show business I'm now ready to tell my story.

A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?" It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)

Wisdom comes from intent, experience, and finding courage.

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.