"Action, not philosophy will get you going. Pick yourself up and move forward. That is the only way you can still enjoy life while you are blessed to be living it."

"You can never regret anything you do in life. You kind of have to learn the lesson from whatever the experience is and take it with you on your journey forward."

"You can map out a fight plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you're down to your reflexes - that means your [preparation:]. That's where your roadwork shows. If you cheated on that in the dark of the morning, well, you're going to get found out now, under the bright lights."

"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

"The idea being that if I was so incredibly small, then I could do almost anything, because what impact would I have, really? What damage could be done, being so puny in the big scheme?"

"I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be."

"I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame you just do it."