Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

The American public does not know poets exist.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.