American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

Why are futuristic movies so primitive, violent and ugly despite having sophisticated technology? Humanity could have an incredible future if we manage the enormous challenges we face.

Son, my dad said, every man needs a bitter, resentful woman in his life. Because there's nothing more touching to a mother's heart than to know that her son thinks of her constantly.

Nothing is more ridiculous than ridicule.

Imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest. … Would you make more time for those people?

Everybody asks me, 'So, what are you doing now?' Why must I be doing something? All my life I've been doing something. All my life I've been doing. For now, I'm being -- being quiet, being grateful.

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

If silence is good for the wise, how much better is it for the foolish!