The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

A person needed to experience real danger or they would never find joy in excelling. There had to be a risk of failure, the chance to die.

The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

When we quit playing Hokey Pokey with God and keep our whole self in, His blessings pursue us!

The classics can console. But not enough.

Some forty years of experience in my field as a scholar and as a teacher have given me great confidence mixed with greater humility.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Exaggerated self-importance is deemed an individual fault, but a racial virtue.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

If I had to choose, I would never take my shirt off again in a movie, but I guess that's not very realistic. I certainly won't be asking to do it, though.