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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? "

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

" Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. "

" 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. "

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