For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Leadership begins by asking how you can make things better?

Nothing's better for art than a little old-fashioned suffering.

Every misfortune is a fortune.

when we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.

I’m sorry that I don’t like your tattoos.”I walked away. I walked back to him. “I mean that I don’t like tattoos, not just your tattoos. I like your skin, though.”I walked away.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

And I definitely gravitate toward people who use laughter to pull themselves out of the abyss.

I like to ride the line between absurd and sincere.

I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in "The Wild Duck," and I afterward had her killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.

They're 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?