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

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

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'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

I want to know exactly how many pieces of myself I had to give away before I became something else entirely.

All right, I'll wait another two thousand years to make jokes about my evilness.

The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia.

We are like lutes once held by God. Being away from his warm body fully explains this constant yearning.

Successful organizations have one common central focus: Customers.

The republic stands for truth and honour. For all that is noblest in our race. By truth and honour, principle and sacrifice alone will Ireland be free.

There are problems in these times, but none of them are mineI'm beginning to see the light

The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn't before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.

We can solve world peace and world famine.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.