Robert Hass

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.