For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I write what's given me to write.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

I had a wonderful time with the Stones but after 31 years, I thought it was time to move on.

I've always thought John Travolta is one of the greatest movie stars Hollywood has ever produced.

I never not wanted to be a singer. Since I was 3, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Well, I can't say I wanted to do it, but I fantasized and thought about it all the time. I never thought it would actually happen.

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

I think that the quality of all bands is steadily improving and it is a pleasant thought to me that perhaps the efforts of Sousa's Band have quickened that interest and improved that quality.

The reason it has relevance is because I, as a popular Arab personality - the Arab people like me and respect me - thought it was time for me to make an ever so tiny statement about what I thought about this whole thing.

We thought it would be fun to try to design a show that would work well internationally and so that' s what we're intending to do with Fraggle Rock, and we are indeed now selling it around the world.

I got confused. I thought it was a K.Y. scare, so I bought 2000 jars of personal lubricant. I still have some.

I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event.

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.

To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.

I think it would have been a lot better for him to say, I did it and I'm sorry, McGwire was never one to show a lot of emotion on the field, not a player who sought attention and craved to be thought of as a nice guy.

I wouldn't have thought of myself as a person who could guide anybody and then it turned out that I can.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

It was pretty extensive - we worked out 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months, which I think is more than anybody in the Olympics. I thought well I don't need this, the girls need it, but it was a gift.

Not much to be perfectly honest! I thought The Phantom Menace was terrible, except for the Pod Race.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

I've always thought that if Israel really wanted to solve the problem, they'd just start tomorrow and push right to the Jordan River, and anything in their way goes. They don't need America or someone else to help.

I thought in terms of the enthusiasm of doing it. I didn't think about whether I was ready.

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

Till I was 13, I thought my name was "Shut Up."