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

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.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

I knew I wanted to act, and I was really driven, so I kept going for it. We moved to L.A. full-time when I was 8 or 9.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.