... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

Oh God, please find it within your heart to grant me a heart that looks after itself only because it has first looked after others. And help me to realize that anything less is not a heart.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

Upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die; another's life, another's death, I stake my whole eternity.

A real man has no tougher judge than himself.

Why would anyone ever tell anything personal to a journalist?

God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does.

Music education is very important. I think that for me growing up, I was disciplined very hard at home.

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.

For voters what matters is what government actually delivers for them.