A good friend is a person who thinks you're one of the good eggs, even if he knows you're a little cracked.

We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.

It's confidence; it has to be something good about getting old. One of the things is that you just don't stress about some stuff that made you so worried.

I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.

The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.

Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.