There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

The mirror will only lie, when you look at it through a mask.

A negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they're constipated!

Normally when people say they haven't decided, they're being polite but they're definitely not voting for you. I think it's different this time. People are thinking hard about the issues.

I don't know if there's a method that I'd like to see younger people bring back, I just want to see everyone of every age in the kitchen.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

If we keep everything in balance, we are in harmony with ourselves and are at peace.

Don't overlook life's small joys while searching for the big ones.

I wasn't worried about turning 40 at all.

I voted Republican this year; the Democrats left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.