I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking

It doesnt seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit, Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

For me, California is all about rest, relaxation, space.

Gardening is in large measure a phenomenon of attention.

I am calm most of the time.

I don't ever use my name for anything in terms of getting the music heard.

This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First-Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go---

Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.

Here's my goal: I want to make a seriously dark show, and not on a network that has ever done that.

The last time we raised the gas tax, which is how we built the interstate system, was 1993.

I always liked the skinny punk girls; I even loved them before punk.

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?