A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

[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.

People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.

Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.