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.

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.

I've always been a fan of Andy Kaufman.

I'm not scared of very much. I've been hit by lightning and been in the Marine Corps for four years.

Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost.

I have a giant baking book, so I close my eyes and pick a random page. Whatever it is, I try to bake it!

The charm of Brittany is to be found in the people and in the churches. The former, with their peculiar costumes and their customs, are full of interest, and the latter are of remarkable beauty and quaintness.

What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.

I belonged to another club, and liked the camaraderie.

I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know.

Facts are, directors are not thinking of me; they think I only act in my films, because they're stupid. Or they think I'm a control freak, that I will try to, I don't know, pimp their scripts and just change everything, which I will never do.

The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

No, I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it.

Scientists are always the ones who head into the ocean, but I want to take writers and politicians, people who can convey the beauty that is there and perhaps do something to take care of it.

Hoosiers don't believe in discrimination.

I think he had a wake-up call. It's a different kind of race, and I think maybe he didn't take it quite as seriously as he might have, but you can bet he learned a lot of lessons.

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn't know she existed until I was 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.

I try to figure out how much of the character I can find in myself because you don't want to get outside of your skill-set.

Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.

Basically, after an ABC sitcom I did, I ended up with a holding deal with 20th Century Fox. Absolutely cool. It pays you to be unemployed. And the bigger the entity that gives you the deal, the better.

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.