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

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.

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

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

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.

[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him.

When grace has won the day, the worldling seeks the world to come.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

Of course slavery and the Muslims were deeply implicated in the slave trade, Islam was an Imperialist religion which destroyed Christianity in the Near East, yet nobody mentions those facts.

Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that's the challenge.

I think the environment is possibly our most worrying thing at the moment, so I think mountaintops are the place to live.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

Great leaders love talent and know where to find it. They surround themselves with talented people who can work effectively together.