We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

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.

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.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

Truth is the greatest marketing campaign.

When Jackson used that particular tone of voice, men died, pure and simple.

Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.

Every time I see a smiling person on earth, I feel the warmth of the Sun in the sky.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

I think America loves cooperative black men. I am not against Colin Powell, but I know who he is.