Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Whether you like it or not, a child really connects you to that time when everything's new. It's so important - not just for artistic endeavors, but for humanity.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers._x000D_ You can kill one, but another is born._x000D_ The words are written down, the deed, the date.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.