It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.

Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.