A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

Stand by your man. Give him two arms to cling to and something warm to come to.

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman giving all your love to just one man.

Success is not the absence of failure; it's the persistence through failure.

I can't control what's fair and unfair. I can't control the nature of the business or the nature of society or the nature of the world, but what I can control is how I choose to see the world and what I choose to put back into it.

I feel if you believe in equality, you have to believe in it for everybody. And that's the way I've always lived my life.

The only concept or experience or core belief that I can attribute my other-ness to is that I just started out a weirdo and I stayed a weirdo. And it took me a long time to embrace my outsidership and see it as a strength rather than a weakness.

For someone to say that marriage is only about procreation is a joke. I didn't marry my husband to have children. I married my husband because I love my husband.

Marriage is a mystery, and part of it is just being kind to each other, not being selfish.

You know, it's about getting out there and having a good time. Not about worrying - all these young books for women are like I'm 29 with a closet full of Prada shoes and I can't get a date. Come on.

For a little while, my mom was a school teacher. And I went to the school that she taught.

One of the first movies my dad took me to see was the original 'Road Warrior.' And I was kind of raised on the action movies of that era: 'The Terminator' and 'Die Hard' and, of course, all of the 'Star Wars' movies.

I don't believe in superheroes but I love Batman movies. There's a part of every person that is entertained by the idealistic, the fantastic.

I have this insane and unabated longing for San Francisco. I come up there every chance that I get.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.

I've always loved video games. I played 'Ms. Pac-man' with my dad, and I Ioved 'Galaga' and 'Tempest' and grew up on the standing arcade games. Even to this day, my dad will call me if he's playing 'Ms. Pac-man' and hold the phone up to the game.

My dad, he was a construction worker. He was a butcher. He was a deep sea fisherman.

I grew up on the back of a motorcycle - my dad didn't have a car until I was a teenager.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

Children are the keys of paradise.

The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.