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

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.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

I never turned down a mother role.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.

I loved my mother, she's a good girl.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

I am scared of becoming a mother.

My mother liked Jim Reeves. I hated his records. He was unbearable.

The eyebrow pencil and false eyelashes were essential; my mother didn't feel dressed without them.

When I was 13 I asked my mother if it was possible for this to end - I'd had enough of it. And that was right about the time that we got a call for "The Exorcist" interview.

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.

I think it's time to do clean-up for a generation. I believe this is one of the movies that hits home for all colors and all races. Everybody I talk to, black or white, suburban, rich or poor, can relate to rejection, can relate to not having a father or a mother.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to.

When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest."