The students always, always surprise me.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

If we don’t do our best and constantly ask God for miracles, it means we are objurgating our responsibility to God.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

My maturity level is rising. I think there are certain situations that I'm handling better than in the past.

Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn't have the anxiety that we'd starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know.

To become an ace a fighter must have extraordinary eyesight, strength, and agility, a huntsman's eye, coolness in a pinch, calculated recklessness, a full measure of courage and occasional luck!

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

I don't need to Google myself.

He can stop me in my tracks, but he can't make me do someting I don't want to

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.