To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by

Positive thinking without any thought is wasted ...

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.

I don't believe in hasty marriages.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

The cure for unhappiness...It's this: What a person needs is always more than they say.

Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises.

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.

I could see myself in the fur coats, turtleneck sweaters, with the Kangol hats like Slick Rick and Dana Dane. But I could also see myself in a leather Troop suit like LL Cool J.