The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.