Each moment is a place you've never been.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

The future is always beginning now.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

It's very hard to write humor.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.

In fact you've got your hands tied behind your back when somebody chooses to take a low road in to you, there is nothing you can do about it, and so you just live with it and move on.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.

My mom told me a long time ago, 'Never get in a fight with a lady.'

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

No amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self-acceptance.

Los Angeles is a city known as much for it's sun as for its stars and it's dirty air.

Design is the art of planning, and it is the art of making things possible.

How weird it was to drive streets I knew so well. What a different perspective.

I follow fashion trends.

We don't swim for the attention. We don't swim to be rock stars. There is something beautiful about being in an anonymous sport and being fairly anonymous. It enables you do something you love without any of the other effects.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at the very heart of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.

I think when you've lost an election by 179, there's going to be a period of time after eighteen years in government when you can't do anything right, and people just kick you for the sake of it, will never admit they voted Conservative.

Show business is one of those things that people can use to get themselves out of the lower rung of society.

I was never really a career woman. My life always came first.

From the gut comes the strut and where hunger reigns strength abstains.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.