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" If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer. "

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" As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. "

" I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. "

" I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. "

" I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life. "

" The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones. "

" I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write. "

" I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing. "

" In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that. "

" One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. "

" I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day. "

" I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment. "

" My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work. "

" Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound. "

" You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about. "

" Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. "

" I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things. "

Material Things

" Poetry is meant to be heard. "

" I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation. "

" Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response. "

" I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded. "

" I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it. "

" At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. "

" It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone. "

" To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example. "

" There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty. "

" Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private. "

" The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails. "

" I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. "

" I like books that are fat and full. "

" So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray. "