A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Yet some there be that by due steps aspireTo lay their just hands on that golden keyThat opes the palace of Eternity.To such my errand is

I find it disturbing that the media keeps referring to my marriage, since I got divorced in 1979. But the media never wants to let me forget.

My Mother set me on the right track, Marty Robbins made me want to write songs, and Jesus Christ did the rest.

And I wonder: Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present?

I do not have a 24-year-old girlfriend. I have another life altogether.

I love comic books. I just do.

Because everything about the voice interests me, I felt it would be fascinating to learn a completely different style of singing.

Spring training is for getting to know your teammates and forming a chemistry. I dont like it.

The great mystery of life is the length of it.

It's fun; baseball's fun.