“I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I...”

“ the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. Excerpt from...”

“Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.”

“I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back. ”

“How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.”

“Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, ...”

“I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.”

“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.”

“Pride is ugly. It says, 'If you succeed, I am a failure.'”

“But who can remember pain, once its over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In lif...”

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely ...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”