Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Oh thee! Lets ignite the fire of love

It requires more strength to be gentle, so it's the everyday encounters of life that I think we've prepared children for and prepared them to be good to other people and to consider other people.

Behavior shapes emotions.

I'm very confident I'm one of the best to ever play the game, but once you talk about the greatest, how can you define greatest?

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about.

New England oysters are better than Chesapeake. But Chesapeake blue crabs are unbeatable.

I measure what's going on, and I adapt to it. I try to get my ego out of the way. The market is smarter than I am so I bend.

Scribbling things down is my therapy. I filter later.