Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.

They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, "Who are you really, wanderer?"-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: "Maybe I'm a king.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.