“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.”

It’s time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.

I always think W.S. Merwin’s poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin.

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.

No one here likes a wet dog.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.

When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

All my life I’ve been doing. For now, I’m being — being quiet, being grateful.

So many people have listened to my song because of it – I’m beyond grateful. It’s funny because when I met Spencer and Dustin, they were so excited to meet me, but I was like you’re the celebrities to me – they’re the ones with a video has over 10 million views.

By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind’s positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.

The good husbands understand and offer to help. “All you have to do is ask” they say. But even helpful husbands have to be thanked, their contributions acknowledged, credit given.

Most of us never stop to consider our blessings; rather, we spend the day only thinking about our problems. But since you have to be alive to have problems, be grateful for the opportunity to have them.

I built a career on my archetype, and I’m grateful, but I’m trying to stretch.

I cannot tell you … how to be rich. But I can tell you how to feel rich, which is far better, let me tell you firsthand, than being rich. Be grateful… It is the only totally reliable get rich quick scheme.

I’ve had a very good career and I’m grateful that the public has had some level of acceptance and appreciation of my work.