You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.

I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her

I don't have any spiritual strategy.

Maybe the culture is [particularly] shabby now. Maybe it's because I'm over sixty, that I can feel that about everything.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Today [people] are ready to take emergency cures, whatever they are, if it's violence, if it's a fascination with serial killing or whatever - the discomfort is so intense. Maybe it's always been like that, certainly it is now.

My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.