The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.

Mythology is a subjective truth. Every culture imagines life a certain way.

Not all who drink energy drinks are douches, but all douches drink energy drinks.

I think the main reason a lot of child stars don't make it is that it's hard to see someone as cute and then all of a sudden see them as having more depth.

Real men don't buy girls-they protect them. We're recruiting real men who have the courage to stand up against this issue.

We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.

Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.

I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. I"m trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.

Earl Nightingale never let a day go by that he didn't learn something new and, in turn, pass it on to others. It was his consuming passion.