When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Every breath is a resurrection.

That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.

To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it’s that dark.

The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.

My hope is in you, Mighty One!

When you decide something's right, there's nothing that can stop you from doing it.

The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.

Eventually, robots will make everything.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

My dad is a natural-born encourager. The last person who will ever tell you to lower your sights or give up your dream.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.