When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

To succeed, with or without money, have deliberate plans to make success out of opportunity. If you are totally dependent on chance, then chances are that you will fail.

Sometimes not looking for something is the best way to look for it

True wisdom lies in gathering the precious things out of each day as it goes by.

I've always kind of gone with my heart.

I do not think of myself as unusually creative. I think we all come from the creator, each human being streaming with the glory. So each one of us is creative.

I feel like the human body is what it is, and the more you make yourself comfortable with it, the better off you are. Love your body and embrace that.

Helplessness is the real secret and the impelling power of prayer.

'Teachers Lounge' is a web series I co-created with Hollis James. We intentionally left the apostrophe out to turn 'Lounge' into a verb. The show is about teachers lounging around, wasting time.

It is of far more important that a man shall play something himself, even if he plays it badly, than that he shall go with hundreds of companions to see someone else play well.

New Zealand is my favorite country to visit.