I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

I still hear the world spinning.

Your mouth is the best thing that ever happened to my mouth. -Zane Cutter

Art should never try to be popular.

When I'm treating myself, it's a full-on burrito, all loaded up!

She was far too busy living out a passionate romance with Jesus Christ to be pining after an earthly prince.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

The act of creation can be an extreme violent experience.

I have decided that whatever time I may have left is left for Him.

An ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.

This is hip-hop. If you've got something you want to rap about, just rap about it, man.