Music is love.

In the end we're all miserable. It's a human condition.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

Both the Bush people and [Barack] Obama people had no problem working with the holdovers. They weren't out to get them.

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree.

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men

For the will and not the gift makes the giver.

Acceptance means that you know, regardless of what happened, that there is something bigger than you at work. It also means you know that you are okay and that you will continue to be okay.

Every child is so helpless - just to survive he has to be political, he has to accept whatsoever the parents are saying.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.