Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.

Most young women do not welcome promiscuous advances. (Either that, or my luck's terrible.)

The media's job is to serve as society's referee, throwing down truth flags when uninformed bigots are shouting their opinions into the wind.

Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

Where instinct fails, intellect must venture.

Some of our weaknesses are born in us, others are the result of education; it is a question which of the two gives us most trouble.

Love is not just tolerance. It's not just distant appreciation. It's a warm sense of, 'I am enjoying the fact that you are you.'

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

Forever will be you and me.

O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there, To waft us home the message of despair?