The unwillingness to try is worse than any failure.

The future is in good hands.

Who I really am keeps surprising me.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

One stands, in fact, in awe of the Constitution of the United States, though it is an idea and not quite a reality.