I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me..

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every ….

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it..

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me..

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one a….

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us ca….

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back..

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photogr….

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less..

We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more..

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky..

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get thr….

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver..

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each oth….

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother..

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him..

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on th….

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown..

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour..

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up..