The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

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.

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

When I went to college, my mum was really sad, so she preserved my bedroom, like a weird time capsule.

Nothing can substitute for just plain hard work

I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don't want to be an enabler, sir. I'd rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.

My English teacher, he's like, he's like Mr. Bu-fu.

Sometimes to go forward you've got to go to the depths of your own personal despair and claw yourself back. From that point, no matter what happens, you know you can do it.

Nobody should be allowed to tinker with democracy. We will not discontinue the good works of the past government.

We live in a world of cause and effect.