We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

The reverence of God is grace to act right.

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

Politics is a thankless occupation; I have no interest in it at all.

It is autumn; not without But within me is the cold. Youth and spring are all about; It is I that have grown old.

I think that Africa has made quite rapid progress and a lot of the conflicts that we saw on the continent have abated.

My sister taught me everything I really need to know, and she was only in sixth grade at the time.

It is God's job to forgive Osama Bin Laden. It is our job to arrange a face to face meeting.

The truth is, this being errand boy to one hundred and fifty thousand people tires me so by night I am ready for bed instead of soirees.

The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; it's the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that's weighed.

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.