Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.

Anything is better than stagnation.

Success come only through high ambition, good guidance, strong will, determining and effort.

Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.

Develop your own skills and styles. In music, designing, electronics, etc., you may have a peculiar way of exposing your dreams in an uncommon way

Good to evil seems evil

I only write about what I do, what happens to me.

I personally think Chimes of Midnight is a much better film than Citizen Kane.

The superior man, while his parents are alive, reverently nourishes them; and, when they are dead, reverently sacrifices to them. His thought to the end of his life is how not to disgrace them.

When I started Victoria Principal Products, there were 22 full-time employees - they were all women