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

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.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

We can invent only with memory.

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

My memory of my mom is a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was a runway fashion model, and she was quite a glamorous woman.

The industry's memory is quite short, it's true.

The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value.

The last four years have not diluted the memory or weakened the resolve of our citizens. Four years later, our hearts still hurt for the families whose loved ones were murdered that day.

Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly.

That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.