I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

The American public does not know poets exist.

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Adversity is a stimulus.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

Acclaim is a distraction.

I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

If bitterness wants to get into the act I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

Some artists shrink from self awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.