I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

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.