If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.

I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

you’re ignoring me so loud that it’s deafening. This silence is so deep that it’s echoing.

....because people die but their memories not.

The night has a thousand eyesAnd the day but oneYet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

A priest goes to Heaven or a priest goes to Hell with a thousand people behind.

There is no greater virtue than honesty.

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.