“If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, Youre out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem? But you ...”

“Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”

“Friedrich Rckert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a whi...”

“You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give lang...”

“Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.”

“Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind ...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“I am the perfect version of me.”

“But if you tame me, then weshall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, Ishall be unique in all the world.”

“I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.”

“I dont want any of this. I just want to be what I was before you showed up here and all hell broke loose. I want to be popular and dating the hottest guy in school. Now Im none of those things, and...”

“The prisoners of the cultures are mostly the women! House is the name of the prison!”

“Our own place is mall perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realise that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world e...”