Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Covetousness puts money above manhood. It shackles its devotee and makes him its victim. It hardens the heart and deadens the noble impulses and destroys the vital qualities of life.

The longer you wait for the future, the shorter it will be.

I'm afraid of Americans.

I don't copy recipes without trying them out. I don't reprint without trying them again.

Obsessions turn people off.

The herald, earth-accredited, of heaven,--which when men hear, they think upon heaven's king, and run the items over of the account to which he is sure to call them.

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

It's safe to assume that no matter where you stand, someone would be happy to be in your shoes, just as you'd be happy to be in someone else's.

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer.