The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

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.

But people had forgotten there was a day in the not too distant past when they’d not seen or heard of bombings, and suicide vests, and snipers. Alicia, though, had not forgotten.

Because you're a girl and when a girl says she's fine, she's lying.

A man ain't got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.

I just hope that you miss me a little when I'm gone.

Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.

He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.

I never wanted to be that person who leaves 'SNL' and nothing happens.

Effort is the siamese twin of success

This is the great fact: strength is life.

We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents