Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

You can control what you put in your body - 100 percent. You really can control your level of fitness and how your body looks.

You need that guy like a giraffe needs strep throat.

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.

MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain

Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.

We pass for what we are.

Love is hard work. It is the hardest work I know of, work from which you are never entitled to take a vacation.

You don't get lucky. You create lucky.