I speak to you in one tongue/ but every moment that ever mattered to me/ occurred in another language.

Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

The writing of a poem is, for me, in the first place, an almost total act of abandon leading to discovery leading to recognition.

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

A nation's art is the expression of its soul.

Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.

We make art so that we can feel life. We do science to understand it.

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

Issues arise not from expecting too much from people, but too little.

There is nothing more thrilling than arriving in a new place on your own and feeling the sense of possibility and excitement that brings with it.

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play.

Life is a unique combination of "want to" and "how to" and we need to give equal attention to both.

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.

For just experience tells, in every soil, That those that think must govern those that toil.

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child - and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.