A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Age is artificial. It's soulless. It doesn't matter one bit.

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?

You had women's kickboxing and they're in the ring and that's what I want to do. I just wanted to fight.

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

There is no recipe for success - it is as unique as you are

Some [people] are really smart. You know who you are. Some [people] are really thick. Unfortunately, you don't know who you are.

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.

Vanity is the poison of agreeableness; yet as poison, when artfully and properly applied, has a salutary effect in medicine, so has vanity in the commerce and society of the world.