No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

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.

I dance to music in my heart.

Live with style and passion

I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle

But we live in a karaoke society... Many people feel they have to dance to someone else's tune, to sing someone else's song.

The name 'Chuck Jones', according to my uncle, limited my choice of profession to second baseman or cartoonist.

Unalienable rights are essential limitations to all governments.

For an entertainer, part of the thing you do is just style. And the coke did help me get into great runs of pure form.

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

It's nice sometimes to open up the heart a little and let some hurt come in. It proves you're still alive.

You don't believe in love, do you?" - "I think it exists. I just don't think it will ever exist for me.