When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

Poetry is a big space and I love it.

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

If the afternoon had been blue, there might have been less desire.

Tick. Tick. Tick. This is the sound of your life running out.

Let the desert wind cool your aching head. Let the weight of the world - drift away instead

All the songs are pieces to the puzzle. They each represent something different. So it's really difficult to say one song represents the album.

Maxim 3: An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

We study there a lot because... what other choice does society give us, right? It's Starbucks or death, sometimes.

It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.

Some report a sea-maid spawn'd him; some that he was begot between two stock-fishes. But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice.