I've been active in a minor way compared to professional activists. I was a labor leader. I led two labor strikes. I've manipulated boards. I've led marches. I've done many things.

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

I feel that my job, as an artist, is to disturb the peace. And to disturb it intellectually, linguistically, politically and literally.

I have left out what I don't remember or don't know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness.

Sometimes a person thinks he's attached to one thing and he's really attached to something else.

The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

There are hundreds of prisons - sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus.

It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

I was ruined before I got started. I say ruined, but I could say blessed; I was too far gone to believe in it. And I'm shocked how generation after generation repeats the behavior.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

Sierra, it's Christmastime. Put a stupid mistletoe over his head and kiss him already!

One can't teach a cat not to catch birds

I always want to sleep on the third date.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.

He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.

The strength of a tree, the old ones say, comes not from growing thicker in the good years when there is water, but from staying alive in the bad, dry times.

Virtues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial.

I'm just chatty. But I do express my opinion.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.