I try to impress upon my students the importance of looking, listening... paying attention, in other words. You must pay attention.

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence.

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.

Show me someone not full of herself and I'll show you a hungry person.

I used to go up to her house. She lived upstate [in New York] and I lived in Manhattan; you're living in a lot of noise and my career was being built. For me to spend time with Nina [Simone] is to spend a lot of quiet time.

I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.