W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.

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.

To love makes one solitary.

If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until you're sixty-five.

Thanks cows. I appreciate your tastiness.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.

It is what you think of this situation that governs you and not the situation itself. Causation is always in mind and not in things.

President Clinton bankrupted Chrysler so that Italians could buy it to ship jobs overseas to China.

We should always be aspiring to know more, and to better ourselves, and to improve ourselves. To improve ourselves, because that's how we improve the world around us, by working within us.

I envy the sensibility in Europe, appreciating beauty in women as they age. I'm going to go that way. I might dye my gray hair for a bit, but beyond that the buck stops. I'm not having any work done.

Democracy feeds on argument, on the discussion as to the right way forward. This is the reason why respecting the opinion of others belongs to democracy.

What happened to him? (Lioness) He pissed me off. (Savitar) Why hasn’t one of the other jaguars taken his place? (Lioness) He pissed me off...big time. (Savitar)