Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

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.

When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.

The monsters were neverunder my bed.Because the monsterswere inside my head.I fear no monsters, for no monsters I see.Because all this timethe monster has been me.

[T[his isn’t just “another day, another dollar.” It’s more like “another day, another miracle.” (213)

We're having a little disagreement. What I want is a big church wedding with bridesmaids and flowers and a no-expense-spared reception and what he wants is to break off our engagement.

I meditate whenever I can. I can be in the back seat of a car or in between appointments.

Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there.

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there?s going to be a tremendous crunch on the backbones for a much higher speed bandwidth. People really ought to be planning for that.

...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.

I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.