Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking

It doesnt seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit, Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

If you believe you can, you might. If you know you can, you will.

Don’t feel shy—kiss. Kiss just to feel the joy of life and to get lost in the beauty of love.

The world doesn’t owe you anything. You have to work for everything you get and you have to appreciate every bit of success the world gives you.

You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well I took masses of opiates religiously.

Golf is like 99.9 percent of my life, and then there's school. I don't get much time to go out with my friends.

If you respect people, and you pay them well, they will do anything for you

But it’s there. Just because I haven’t told anyone doesn’t mean it isn’t there, all the time, lurking in the back of my mind, like one those NSync songs you can’t get out of your head.

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

Anybody who told you to be yourself simply couldn't have given you worse advice.

The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.