The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.

Some mistakes are worth making twice.

By different methods different men excel, but where is he who can do all things well?

I just try to get people to laugh - I'm not trying to change the world or anything.

The fulfilling of who you are and your purpose for being here is not found outside, it's trusting God to move you, to inspire you.

It isn't all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.

Sacrifice self to bless one another, even as God has blessed you. Forget self in laboring for mankind.

Everyone could face something that hurts him. But I don't expect that I will be hurt

... but the greatest wisdom is blinded by the glare of vanity.

Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.