Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

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.

May you find love, joy and hope at Christmas and every day of your life.

The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

Dimples crinkle up the skin near his lips. I will not look at his lips. How can he never have used those? That’s a crime against humanity right there.

I think one of the greatest things about the Republican Party is the understanding, we don't point fingers and we have class.

If the Lord's bearing our sin for us is not the gospel, I have no gospel to preach.

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.

In a way, the main fault of all books is that they are too long.

I'm still rough around the edges and need a lot of polishing.

The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.