I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.

I have become an orchid washed in on the salt white beach. Memory, what can I make of it now that might please you- this life, already wasted and still strewn with miracles?

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In the end I would rather wonder than know

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.

A relationship is the vessel in which you come to know yourself

The full length of a frog doesn't have to be seen when it's dead. It has to be seen when it jumps. Aim for greater heights always.

Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law.

My natural gravitation is toward the gray and the black and the white and the burgundy. Sort of muted, cool colors.

I've never met anyone who has said, "My goal is to make America mediocre." That's a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.

In movies you get to do that. Sometimes with the vigilante justice movie he has to also tangle with police, which are traditional or security people. Is there going to be any of that in this?

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield.

And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink.