The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

We’re all the same. We all have the means to save ourselves and carry ourselves home.

To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence.

Whether you want to or not, you do serve as a role model. People will always put more faith in baseball players than anyone else.

If a car comes past me in a traffic jam with a boom box going, I jump out of my skin. Those big booming basses. I'm just more sensitive to noise these days.

I grew up with a house full of dogs. My mother was a great nature lover and taught us to have almost a religious sense of respect for the natural world.

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

The loftiness of understanding embraces all. It requires as much spirit to suffer the failings of others as it does to appreciate their good qualities.

If you don't get result-oriented with the kids, you can focus on the things in the process that are important to them being successful.

I have a tremendous respect for writers who scribble away their torments, and their passions into plays.

I liked being in the Marines. They gave me discipline I could live with. By the time I got out, I was able to cope with things on a more realistic level.