If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

It is not enought to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

There is no shame in doing the right thing, even if its too late.

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

In fact, I'd just like to own something. Everyone thinks I'm glamorous, rich and famous but all I've got is some recording equipment and a battered old BMW.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

One of the most visible effects of a child's presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles.

We do have an obligation to deter conflict and to prepare for it should it occur.

Early on, he'd learned to enjoy simple things, things that couldn't be bought, and he had a hard time understanding people who felt otherwise.

There are three things which the public will always clamour for, sooner or later; namely: novelty, novelty, novelty.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.