“What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.”

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

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.

I’m not oblivious to that connotation of changing careers, so I’m just going in and doing the job.

Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn’t been born yet. It’s difficult.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

As for super-stardom, I can say that I’m ready for anything. I feel like I’ve mastered so many stages in my life and the cool thing is, I don’t see that energy changing anything.

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

It’s interesting, winning an Academy Award as a young man… life-changing, but I’m just me within that.

If you’re changing diapers and going to the playground, any ambitions of being a cool guy have to fly out the window.

Two words that will change your life…. Yes Lord!