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.

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.

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.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess. 5:18).

In the life of a Christian, there are no accidents, only Divine appointments.

To realize one's destiny is a person's only obligation

Good strategy, keep the conversation going until a guard notices the bodies outside the door. Maybe bursts in to save you. Not a bad idea.

You won't reach anywhere... if you lie!

Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.

If I could control the behavior of fat guys I would make them ride mopeds more often.

experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur.

In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to make a positive impact.

The more seriously we understand the radical nature of sin, the more it exercises a restraint upon us.