Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Love makes the air light.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.