If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father's wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father's care.

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

He who hates himself is not humble.

I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

Having children has made me incredibly efficient. It's hard to leave them in the mornings, but I'm extremely productive during the day, knowing I want to be fully focused on them when I get home.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

I don't have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.

I am an artist who works very well under pressure, in fact. I like to have deadlines.

There are eleven or twelve or thirteen cities in China with populations of over 10 million people and most people in the West have never even heard of these cities.