I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

Life's better when it's fun. Boy that's deep isn't it?

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

But from the good health of the mind comes that which is dear to all and the object of prayer-happiness.

Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go. [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]

I love the silent era because you can see the rules being written, the grammar of film being created. Most of my films are in some way love letters to the silent era.

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

We all feel disabled in some way. We all feel imperfect. It's hard to be looked at for various reasons.

I'm totally into the emotional aspect of things.

The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.

Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.