I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

Life is not a battle to win but a melody to sing.

To hurt is as human as to breathe.

We have one thing in common with umbrellas: We both exist because the rain exists!

All the stories are true

Most importantly: Don't adjust your results to build up the ego of the chief strategist. Especially if the strategist is you.

The ordinary saying is, Count money after your father; so the same prudence adviseth to measure the ends of all counsels, though uttered by never so intimate a friend.

I think humans will find their humanity sometime, somehow.

Sometimes, knowing when to let go is just as important as knowing when to hold tight.

I'm tired of being a nice guy, I've been poor all my life, but don't know quite why.

Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song.