If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

There is never a need to justify anything to others, only yourself.

Out of ignorance and fear comes judgment and division.

I will try and make peace between North and South Korea.

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

To be well prepared for war is the best guarantee of peace.

To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.

You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

When I get to first base, I start thinking about third.

Never be a cynic, even a gentle one. Never help out a sneer, even at the devil.