This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it's just for a few moments.

Always in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return

I see sad crushed plastic everywhere and put some thoughts composed of words that do not belong together together and feel a little digital hope.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.

So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines.

Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected.

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

I feel because I am never in my comfort zone I have an advantage.

I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.

My heart is filled with overflowing gratitude.

That night it did not rain as much in the sky as it did in his heart.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Little wealth, little care.

Careers can disappear just as quickly as they're made, so I'm in no hurry.

Too few accomplish twice as much as too many.

Acting is a specific discipline. Just because you can sing doesn't mean you have the sensitivities of being an actor.

Powerman don't need to fight, powerman don't need guns, powerman got money on his side.

Laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life. Either you laugh and suffer, or you got your beans or brains on the ceiling.

Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.