The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.

Greatness is the amount of time you were able to invest into cultivating your ground.

Divorce is not always a doorway to happiness. The same can be said about marriage.

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

There's always one teacher you had a crush on; for me, it's my wife's aerobics instructor.

She (my ex-wife) wanted me to stop being Evel Knievel. I am who I am. I'm not going to change. I'll settle down the day they put me in a six-foot pine box.

I feel like a man who has had truckloads of filth heaped upon him; I am now asked to struggle to my feet and talk while more truckloads pour more filth around my head.

It's one thing to make a beautiful thing; it's another thing to make a living thing.

Valhalla on the right. Paradise regained on the left. Stuck between a Godiva truffle and a chocolate eclair. Between a rock and a very hard place. Two very hard places from the looks of it.

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

In his own time and in his own way, the Lord will bring about his miracles.