Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

Regardless of whether luck or coincidence is involved, desires directed in the right way have a tendency to manifest.

People look at me, and they go, 'You're white, you're smart, you must have went to college. You must have grown up with money.'

The main thing is that you have a good editor - one that believes in you and who will give you the feedback that you need to produce a good book.

Whoever said life without love isn't worth living didn't own an iPhone. These things are great.

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.

Nobody can be perfect unless he admits his faults, but if he has faults how can he be perfect?

If your education is not enough, experience will teach you lessons.

Taste is changing, style is changing, and players abilities are changing.

There is almost always a major blip for whatever reason and we have learnt to expect it and not to panic.

The deepest fear we have, 'the fear beneath all fears,' is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It's this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.