Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.