The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

All of those on the left, as I am, have always vastly preferred the democratic society over the hierarchical society and still do, but the democratic culture doesn't exist without highly informed citizens capable of thinking well, and if you have schools in which 40 percent of the people coming out of them cannot make change for a dollar, you don't have a democracy. You have a sibling society.

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.

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.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.