“The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.”

There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.

Life and mind are continuously in conflict with each other. I want happiness, security. I won’t reach that by considerations of my mind; on the contrary they will lead to a certain despair of the inner person. Not what he thinks engages the artist, but what he feels.

I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.

You have to be sensitive but honest. You have to be a gentleman and do it in person. You have to look her in the eyes.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

A Christian will say… “I believe God created me in one day” Yeah, looks liked He rushed it.

But people that are worried about unborn babies are the same ones that vote against kindergarten programs in Indiana or school lunch funds out of the federal government.

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.

Beauty is the result of realizing what is special about you and not focusing on the things you don’t like.

One of these days I’m-a make me a book out of you.

…pleasure, of course, is a slippery word…. Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure’s source.

You describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind’s negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future.

Live constructively and live optimistically.

NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault.

We realize–often quite suddenly–that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us, it has no center.

These … tables (values of trignometric functions), constructed by means of new techniques based principally on the calculus of differences.

Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.

Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.