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

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" I simply do not distinguish between work and play. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. "

" I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings. "

" 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

" Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. "

" 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. "

" If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like. "

" Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. "

" I like books that are fat and full. "

" I'd rather write about polar bears than people. "

" To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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