Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts.

Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?

If you hack the Vatican server, have you tampered in God's domain?

An artist has got to be constantly in a state of becoming.

When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society.

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.

Evolution created a violent order where beings eat other beings. Till we change this order and create a harmony between all beings, there shall be no real peace on Earth.

A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.

My final historical romance came out December 2005. While I enjoyed writing medieval romances, I was also dying to write something with more edge.

Thus we play the fool with the time and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.