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" My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing. "

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" 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. "

" You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. "

" There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay. "

" Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did. "

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

" Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them. "

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

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

" Apparently, I've been considered a recluse. "

" I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. "

" I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read. "

" 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. "

" I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all. "

" I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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

" Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. "

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

" When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. "

" To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. "

" I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force. "

" I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it. "