Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.

She feared God may not deliver her out of this mess, especially if He had a greater plan.

My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

Any fear is always worse than the thing itself.

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

Death is dreadful to the man whose all is extinguished with his life; but not to him whose glory never can die.

I've never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind.

I have no fear, no fear at all. I wake up, and I have no fear. I go to bed without fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Yes, 'fear' is a word that is not in my vocabulary.

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.