The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.

I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

One isn't born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.