we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.