Sometimes a person thinks he's attached to one thing and he's really attached to something else.

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

I feel that my job, as an artist, is to disturb the peace. And to disturb it intellectually, linguistically, politically and literally.

I have left out what I don't remember or don't know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness.

The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

There are hundreds of prisons - sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus.

It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

I've been active in a minor way compared to professional activists. I was a labor leader. I led two labor strikes. I've manipulated boards. I've led marches. I've done many things.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

I was ruined before I got started. I say ruined, but I could say blessed; I was too far gone to believe in it. And I'm shocked how generation after generation repeats the behavior.

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

Change takes time. But, it also takes people.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

The health care is going to be less money, and we're going to have much better health care.

The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

I'm a proponent of a playoff so everybody can calm down.

I think right now, the focus has got to be on how we hold [Donald] Trump accountable.

We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

I know not my own heart if it be not absolutely free.