“When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.”

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.

I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

Strangers are an endangered species.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

Experience is always larger than language.

Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

But beware, dear reader. For we go out into the wide, wild world, looking to change, looking to grow, looking for wisdom. But wisdom is hard to come by, and once achieved, it is very easily lost.

I don’t like to look typical.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up

It’s not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science – people love science, especially the millennials.

Transitioning to being an unemployed film actor is different, but it’s fun and I’ve been looking forward to it for a while.

Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.