It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

The future is always beginning now.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Shake off the cloud of mere routine to find tranquil rustic joys and peace that serve to fuel audacious power and passion.

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

Michael seems to have lost his values temporarily. He just has to be worked with, disciplined and talked to and given some tender loving care and understanding.

I've had fans come and knock on my door. I'm usually polite, but I'm usually very direct and say, 'It's not cool that you come here uninvited.

Once you have given up your limited self willingly to the Unlimited, you will rejoice so much in that consciousness that you will not care to be small again.

O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings

Oftentimes I’ll just overflow, and then I’ll need to spend a week alone and not talk to anybody or call anybody.

I believe - we all pay taxes. I'm happy to pay it, but I hate to have it abused, money wasted, no accountability. That's going to bother you.

I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts.