It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

Equality has no place for genius.

Everyone has a differentjourney in life. Don’t judgesomeone else for theirs.

Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

And something tells me if it matters, maybe it shouldn't be easy.

My strength has always been slow songs, so I never deviated from that, I always took care of my base and that's just doing slow songs and just pouring out my heart in songs.

I get way more nervous playing golf in front of 500 people than being on stage in front of 20,000 people.

I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe.

Socialism appeals to me. It's like imposed Christianity. You've got to share.