“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 ...”

“A cheap writer has an expensive thoughts.”

“It's rewarding if you have an opportunity to do something or to serve, you always give in your best. The world has changed, yes! But that shouldn't make you behave otherwise to the detriment of you...”

“The people of great value are the people who have a noble inner man”

“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.”

“Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.”

“Oh, Sweetie. No one ever gets through their TBR list. For every book you finish, you'll add five more. That's just the way it works.”

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”