To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.