When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.

My mother never forgave my father

We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.