Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.

There are two kinds of idiots - those who don't take action because they have received a threat, and those who think they are taking action because they have issued a threat.

If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?, ’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.

When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.

There are things I cannot say.

Virtue is safe only when it is inspired.

Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!

We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

Ah, you fight like a sissy demon. (Takeshi) Sissy demon? Have you ever met a sissy demon? (Savitar) I killed three this morning. (Takeshi)