I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.

The most precious love is often the kind that isn't returned, and that is given freely.

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.

I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.

It's terrible to know that no matter how you try to help your child, his condition will worsen.

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in that chaotic reality, and also this: that none of us knows anything about anything. Period.

People romanticize, I think, this notion of life. But life at all costs is not life, it's ego-extension.

I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.

I do believe that great love brings with it the terror and possibility of great loss.

I think it's more important to concentrate on trying to be, simply, happy. Once you've known deep despair, you feel even more motivated to be as happy as possible. That's how I feel.

Anyone can act if he has the will to do so, and anyone who says he wants to but doesn't have the knack for it suffers from a lack of will, not a lack of talent.

We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

I wish to emphasize the fact that our homes should be more attractive and that more of our amusements should be in the home instead of the streets.

I love being directed. Because it's another thought, it's another fresh idea. You're so grateful for an original idea that you haven't had.

I like the idea about somewhere there being a world... somewhere there's a world that I don't know about. But also, that somewhere, there was once something that disappeared.

When people have no interest in a subject, it's very hard to get them to laugh about it.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

Ireland is a small but insuppressible island half an hour nearer the sunset than Great Britain.

Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.