My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

If you truly have character and respecting others is your core value, you respect everybody regardless of who they are, what they believe and how they behave...

To a longer and worse life, a shorter and better is by all means to be preferred.

People help each other through a crisis by each supposing that the other can handle it better than he himself can.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

Are you making life or is life making you?

There's no posterity to write for. I'm writing now for mutated arthropods.

Do not steal something that already belongs to you or pine for people who are sitting right next to you.

Most of all, I like the fact that you share yourself with me. That I don't have to prove my strength to you. I don't have to hurt or be hurt to lie with you." - Vane

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

When my coach gives me a program, I damage it.