When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

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.

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!

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.

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

I have five young children, and I take being a role model very seriously.

The persistent problem in photography is how to look at it.

Hope is the forward-looking part of memory.

Love's secret is always to be doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such very little ones.

The chaste mind, like a polished plane, may admit foul thoughts, without receiving their tincture.

I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don't think I took my whole self with me - I think I played a role of being too cool and hip.

Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.

The worlds of Truth (love) and illusion (fear) are like parallel universes; with every thought we make a choice which one to inhabit

Anything can change, because the smartphone revolution is still in the early stages.