Poetry is a big space and I love it.

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

I love you, Jocelyn, and nothing, not even death, will ever keep me away from you.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

If she stays she stays if she goes jst let her go, making her pregnant won't stop her from leaving

We must dilute and disperse all forms of concentrated power that refuse to be accountable to majority wishes.

Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it.

One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

There are far more talented people doing voice work than I.

I was never coached; I was never told how to hold a bat.

He had not yet lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand then the impossible, and that what must be looked for is always the unforeseen.