Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
You shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.
If you purify the pond, the lilies die.
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn’t get anywhere.
My question is “when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?” You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, ‘Is this good?’ A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That’s not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
Language can do what it can’t say.
One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
I’ll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.