 I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write. |
| To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. |
| My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work. |
| So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray. |
| Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response. |
| Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. |
| I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it. |
| When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. |
| I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things. |
| If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer. |
| As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. |
| I simply do not distinguish between work and play. |
| Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. |
| To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. |
| I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings. |
| In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that. |
| I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing. |
