Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

It's good to have an end in mind but in the end what counts is how you travel.

science enables you to look things differently.

Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life.

What other people think of me is none of my business.

My faith isn't very churchy, it's a pretty personal, intimate thing and has been a huge source of strength in moments of life and death.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

What's the most important thing in the world? It's love, and I look at that as an energy, not a sentiment.

Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world and that's why l like them.

Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.

Human beings absolutely follow through on who they believe they are