The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

But there was little heart to our lust, only the confusion of not knowinghow long we'd have in our bodies.

It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.

Spreading an idea is hard work.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Without the word dream, or the concept dream, and without the word blue and the emotions, I would have been really limited in the things I've written and performed.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.