“I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.”

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

I came to explore the wreck.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

Every time ‘Lady Macbeth’ and everyone involved in the film gets nominated, it’s amazing.

Every generation witnesses atrocities. People in power try to fulfill prophecy.

From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea – written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo – “There is no substitute for victory!”

To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

In the closing seconds of every game, I want the ball in my hands for the last shot – not in anybody else’s, not in anybody else’s in the world.

Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day.

And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not…not be able to do what I want with you.