I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

He thinks of that ocean house and wishes he were back in his former life or that one could take one moment and remain inside it like an egg inside its shell, instead of constantly being hurried into the future by good luck or bad.

Actions have consequences. Ignorance about the nature of those actions does not free a person from responsibility for the consequences. (28)

Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.