I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realized that simplicity is the key to everything.

In the fleeting light she saw the meadow, dotted with stunted hawthorns, their twisted limbs dense with red berries, and then a shape: achingly familiar, child-sized, shockingly still.

You win some, you lose some, you wreck some.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

We need to be visionary; we have to be bold.

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

It's really a drag to sit around when you're old, and think, 'Ah, gee, I never went to France.' Go to France. Life is very short; you've got to pack it all in there.

Donald Trump has always had women around him in powerful positions. That's true in his corporation, in his campaign, and now his cabinet.

I wasn't a predator. I didn't pick on other people all right, but people didn't beat me up.

That affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.