One of the things I'm constantly telling my students is that they're never going to write a poem everyone gets, or if they do, they've failed. They should leave someone behind every time.

Human suffering is articulated in language; communication is how we seek help, consolation, etc.

I figure I write for people who are intelligent enough to do some labor. Lazy readers are not my ideal readers.

Revision is a good impulse to have.

I turned to human suffering because - this may sound odd - animal suffering is more difficult for me to deal with.

I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative.

I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

I enjoy working on a number of projects - books - at once.

I tend to overuse the word "project" only because "book" is terrifying while I'm still in the middle of something. A project can fail. I don't want a book to fail.

I always revise when I publish in a book. So versions in magazines are sometimes slightly different.

I pay editors. I never ask friends or colleagues to work for free.

No man can be skillful without first investing his time into relentless rehearsals.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.

An irrelevance, and your life's altered.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, "boy, there's an original thought!

I pretty much know that directing means that you have to answer about a thousand questions every day and you have to answer them quick.

You could use a flower, a candle flame, anything you want that's suggestive of beauty and eternality.

The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.

Anticipation forward points the view.

I'm just trying to stay aggressive and mix things up enough to be successful.

How nice of Acheron to send us a playmate. (Daimon) Play is for children and dogs. Now that you have identified which category you fall into, I'll show you what Romans do to rabid dogs. (Valerius)