Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.