Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world.

It is not easy writing someone a postcard. The size and shape of the card cut you down to size.

Not everyone is at the top of his or her game all the time - you can't be.

Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral.

So writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary.

I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.

It seems more than likely that the translating of poetry is going to rub off on the translator if he or she is a poet.

Collaborating with someone who doesn't understand your language nor you theirs stretches you open even wider, into a sort of very large free fall.

Sometimes. I get recognized, but I'm not really a famous famous. I'm pretty low on the showbiz totem pole - I mean, I'm no Jon or Kate plus eight. I'm just a comic, not a baby factory.

After the climb, you should feel no trace of tiredness; on the contrary, it is then that you should be really fresh. Then you will have found the correct measure of your abilities.

rejected both the appropriateness of an apology and of monetary redress.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

Where there is no standard, there can be no improvement. For these reasons, standards are the basis for both maintenance and improvement

If the current is right, one can drift to success.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

My career was full of struggles and dreams, disappointments and peaks and valleys. But there was no Twitter, no Facebook or TMZ. Young actors could make mistakes and not become the focus of tabloids.

And that was what I was asking to happen and I was told that the indictment would be signed, but I was coming to the end of my one-year contract, I had to return to New Zealand for personal reasons.