Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed he who fears corruption fears life.

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

I'm not an old experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

I learnt more about politics during one South Dakota dust storm than in seven years at the university.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

Poetry is innocent not wise. It does not learn from experience because each poetic experience is unique.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and more especially from her lyrics of the last generation.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry all that he has learned about poetry is only a partial assurance.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth to learn how to do that to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

However I learned something. I thought that if the young person the student has poetry in him or her to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

Science is for those who learn poetry is for those who know.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching I think.

From what the moderns want we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did what poetry must be.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

I could start a war in 30 seconds. But some countries spend 100 years trying to find peace. Just like good manners peace has to be learned.

The very first lesson that I learnt from the Qur'an was the message of unity and peace.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.