We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Write the poem only you can write.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

To fall in love and to commit yourself to love means you should make your loved one the one thing you cherish the most.

Thus, while I quaff the genial wine, I live mid transports quite divine.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

My mother used to tell me: "You gotta smile more. Because if you don't smile, the way you look at people, they'll think you're mad at them."

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem

Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person.

But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.

My husband always felt that a marriage and career don't mix. That's why he's never worked.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

I hope I was a good example of women's tennis.