I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

A good artist is willing to die many times over. What's funny is, I've died so many times.

Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.