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.

The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

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

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.