Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

If you wish to grow thinner diminish your dinner.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation. I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.

I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.

Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, And the more we know the more uncertain we become.

Fighting is easy to understand. You just hit the guy as hard as you can.

From out of pain, beauty.

When some fellers decide to retire nobody knows the difference.

Only a kind person is able to judge another justly and to make allowances for his weaknesses. A kind eye, while recognizing defects, sees beyond them.

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

I realized painting could look like a film, and a film like a painting.