I write what's given me to write.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.

Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.

Death is just another path to take, as real as morning.

A book can take you to another land, even if just for a few hours. --Cat Spydell

Now that we can do anything what will we do?

We are a nation of communities... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

It's always interesting to see what judges do when their legal philosophy conflicts with their political views.

Hope encourages men to endure and attempt everything; in depriving them of it, or in making it too distant, you deprive them of their very soul.

How very dull our lives would be without literature! How very much dark and poor, how so sad and empty the world would be!

Painting is a hobby for me.