Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

You rock a sobbing child without wondering if today's world is passing you by, because you know you hold tomorrow in your arms.

A child's cry touches a father's heart.

You never know anyone until you marry them.

Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.

I'm a dad, and I no longer see a way for my kids to even inherit the money that I'm making, let alone go out there, have an idea, and create it in their own lifetime.

We expect the listener to have, like, a movie going on when they hear us. That's what it's all about for us.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I don't really care how I sound.

Anyone who would tackle our current addiction to fossil fuels is going to have to maneuver around denial.