This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?
I step naked into the shower of truth - whole-hearted, bloody-minded, utterly selfish, no longer even pretending to enjoy or understand anything.
The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless - for these, suddenly, I am being praised.
There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.
Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.
I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.
Poetry is a big space and I love it.
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.
The biggest threat we face is the possibility of terrorist groups like al Qaeda equipped with weapons of mass destruction, with nukes, bugs or gas. That was the threat after 911 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.
The best artists are gone now.
When an individual does not become conscious of their inner contradictions, the world acts out the conflict and is torn in opposite halves.