There’s no preparation for poetry.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.