One does not become a guru by accident.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one.

No one has the right to demand that your body be something other than what it is.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

The good thing is, we have household formation in this country. We have a country where I don't know whether it's a million households a year or more, but good form.

The revolution will survive. It does not rely solely on oil for its survival. There is a national will, there is a national idea, a national project.

That's what's great about show business. It's escapism. You pay your five bucks to get in and sit there and you're in another world. Forget about the problems in the world. It's wonderful.

There are only two kinds of parents. Those who think their offspring can do nothing wrong, and those who think they can do nothing right.

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.

Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.