The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

Poetry, above all is a series of intense moments ­ its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.

It’s two things

The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.

This is a matter of Congress authorizes spending. They order me to spend.

Live with fewer things that have greater meaning.

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

I like walking on the edge.

To lose patience is to lose the battle.

There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that.

I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.