True love is rare, and it's the only thing that gives life real meaning.
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
The moment when a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political
A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.
When you're standing in front of an audience like this that is so enthusiastic and so much behind you, it is very hard to give a bad speech. Even a bad speech sounds good in a convention hall like this.
what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized. . . we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. the sham is everywhere.
I try to write three jokes every day. I don't sit down and write them, it's just things that pop into my head. Then I'll go watch it fail onstage that night.