If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.