You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

If you want to change your nation, you have to start a conversation.

I did for the fun of it

Your body's just a vehicle, transporting the soul. It's what's inside of people, is beauty to behold.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

I had a lot of fun working with John Candy. We had a pretty good rapport.

You are nearly there," said James. "Very close. We are...so proud of you.

The spiritual process is always individual. You may sit in a group, but only the individual can evolve, only the individual can liberate himself.

I was drunk: Christian and drunk. They just don't go together. But that's what happened. And the next day, obviously God had honored those prayers and healed me of alcoholism.

What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger is woman.

Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.