All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.