To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.

Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

If in your mind it was possible to take a year's sabbatical from work to reassess your life, what would you do and where would you go?

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.