My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.

It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

I'm a hopeful romantic. In a couple of drinks, I'll be a lucky romantic. That's why they call me Mr. Lucky.

While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.

In 19 years Stockton never once lost a suicide drill in practice. Well, there was one day. He was sick. But he still ran it

A man with an experience of God is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.

I'm not here to write a song for you, I'm here to help you write a song for yourself.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors: The north is thine; there hast thou build thy dark, Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs, Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.