Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

The future is always beginning now.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

There’s something about human nature which draws us to people who are authentic and makes us want to repel those that aren’t.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

Man is the mirror God holds up to himself, the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.

The key to beating the Dodgers is to keep them form hugging each other too much.

My dad brings a deep-seated knowledge of the British folk genre, and a lot of my love for guitar playing comes from learning from him and his influences, which eventually became my influences.

If you capture the first thought that you have when you're creating, and then play that to people, it's kind of like the listeners are part of that beginning. And that's the most exciting part.

The fact that I'm a performer helps me enormously as a lyricist.

On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me.

I really like Iceland. One of the nicest things about it is that I hardly ever had to reach for my credit card. There's practically nothing there to go shopping for.

I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.