The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

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.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'

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.

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.