I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.

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.

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

My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?

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?

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