I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

Now I will give you a piece of advice. I will tell you something that I absolutely believe you should do, and if you do not do it you will never be a witer. It is a certain truth. When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.

[On filling out a grant application:] I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.

The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.