Have a purpose to your life: Purpose does not mean having a job...You can have a job and still be unfulfilled.

If I'm going to a new country, I try to learn something about the language and the culture, so I don't just go bumbling over things.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Courage, I don't think anybody is born with courage. I think you may be born with a flair to braggadocio, you know. That's not courage.

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating.

We are not just flesh and blood. And our hungers are not going to be set aside as just flesh and blood.