The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

There is a very great difference between older and old, the former being desirable and the latter being inevitable.

Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?

Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive.

I don't think having a My Chemical Romance action figure will make a kid start his own band, I like to think it will make him save children from a burning building.

Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.

I was very much provoked. Of course, I knew there are no fairies; but that needn't prevent my thinking there is.

My father believed, like Pericles, that a mans genius could be easily judged by the number of unenlightened fools set in phalanx against his ideas.

Desire will in due time externalize itself as concrete fact.