It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

A trifle can be enough when luck is on your side.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I don't think you should meet the people you most admire. I don't want reality to interfere with my image.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

NAFTA stripped us of manufacturing jobs. We lost our jobs. We lost our money. We lost our plants. It is a disaster.

Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.

Whatever my situation, I'm a strong disciplinarian; I can do what I hate to do but do it like I love it.

Creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all people.

For me, there are a lot of things you can imagine as an actor, and then there are things that you know in your bones and in your cells once they happen to you.

Pan's Labyrinth works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it. It is, at times, a joyless picture, and its pall of sadness can begin to weigh you down.