I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him...

The atheists traditionally hold their conventions from Good Friday to Easter Sunday during the hours Christ spent in the grave.

Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

Oh sirs, deal with sin as sin, and speak of heaven and hell as they are, and not as if you were in jest.

I will be 60 or 70 years old still rocking my Chanel blazer with my hair all coiffed.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

There were so many stories about Bing's daughter living in sin. We weren't hurting anyone. We were living in love. I couldn't understand why people were trying to hurt us and hurt our families.

Ask yourself constantly "Am I treating my fellow citizens as I treat my mum?"

If you don't take it for granted that the other man will do his job, you're not an executive.