Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

The future is always beginning now.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

A bruise is a lesson... and each lesson makes us better.

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

I ask people impertinent questions. Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.

If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.

It can be made only when one recognizes the ground of being itself, when one recognizes directly that One is All.

No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.

Our country will not stand for any political plan that includes amnesty for insurgents.

I get most of my news from the Jon Stewart Daily Show.It's the most level commentary you can find.You have to laugh, because it's all so true.It's the closest thing to a counterculture.

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

I know nothing about Christianity, nothing about football, and I'm not a Republican.