I write what's given me to write.

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.

Playing a stadium is a big adrenaline boost for me and I dig it. It keeps me on my toes and makes me revamp everything I'm doing and not get stagnant with how I approach every show, which is something I like.

I was very fortunate, because I don't think many people get to spend time with their great-grandfathers. So, he passed away when I was 15, so I spent a lot of time with him. We lived together. He traveled a lot, but when he was here, we lived together.

The big difference with Juliette and the others in that film is that she goes beyond acting.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

Venture capitalists certainly create value for themselves, but they also singularly create value for the rest of the world.

I am a firm believer that if you score one goal the other team have to score two to win.

When you're with another actor who's also been through five hours of prosthetic makeup, and you're eating another person's neck, and fake blood is being spurted out at you for two minutes, it's incredibly fun, and you're in character for that time. You can't really believe that that's your job.

I figured my wife was about to start law school. If that whole baseball pitching thing didn't work out, I had something to fall back on. I figure I'd put a ring on her finger. Turns out she was the smart one. Turns out she was the gold digger, not me.

Finance industry executives earn an annual income, including benefits, grants and bonuses, that can reach over eight million shekels a year.

Dad taught me everything I know. Unfortunately he didnt teach me everything he knows.

People are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice.

The tough thing about these senatorial jobs is you get 'yes' or 'no' votes. Your whole job is to either say 'yes' or 'no' and explain why.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.

I always wanted to be an actor, but my top three favorite actors of all time are Al Pacino, James Dean and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I went to watch my father at Silverstone in the early 1950s, and I've still got the car he was in.

A tip for increased sales or in situations of life or death: Try to always refer to the lady as Miss. or Ms. Using the term: Ma'am could piss her off.

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

I am attracted by almost any French word - written or spoken. Before I knew its meaning, I thought 'saucisson' so exquisite that it seemed the perfect name to give a child - until I learned it meant 'sausage!'

Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.

Prudence dictates that there should be a balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.

I think some of the funniest and most artistic people I know are the ones who had a hard time at school. They often have humility and artistry. So, as much as I feel bad for kids who have to go through a rough childhood, I believe that if they can turn it around, it's going to make them better people later on.

Don't just expect the scouts to find you. Go to camps, clinics and make sure you are seen.

I would imagine that if you could understand Morse code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.