There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

I can wait until my heart bleeds with sorrow.

You are the most magnificent flower. Your beauty is immeasurable and incredible. The universe created you with all of her love and power to see herself in you.

Your only limitation is the limits of your imagination so dream big.

I am in that glorious position where I can redesign and re-package my own work.

My favorite Aspen memory is saving an upside-down cake that had exploded from the high altitude.

The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal.

Death ends our woes, and the kind grave shuts up the mournful scene.

Music is one of those art forms that you can get pretty immediate feedback by just doing it and getting better at it.

You can't remain inactive in the face of injustice without, to some extent, being guilty of it.

As Latinos, we are so aware of what people go through in order to come to America. It's very interesting to do research on something that's been culturally a part of your existence.