“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 ...”

“Some people think football [soccer] is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

“Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”

“If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of h...”

“Ihr redet, wenn ihr aufhrt mit euren Gedanken in Frieden zu sein.”