And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.

If you don't mark your successes the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office and there's no poetry in that.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed for instance is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

It's something we guys have all done. Made tapes for girls trying to impress them to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it because you're too awkward to do it.

I could probably give you a list of a dozen pet peeves I have about my own physicality and why I couldn't get a second date.

My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.

A pet store is a celebration of dogs' existence and an explosion of options. About cats a pet store seems to say 'Here we couldn't think of anything else.' Cats are the Hanukkah of the animal world in this way. They are feted quietly and happily by a minority but there's only so much hoopla applicable to them.

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat I am sure could walk on a cloud without coming through.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

What could become a danger to world peace is Iran's nuclear program and the country's open threat to annihilate Israel.

Well I think by any expectation South Africa has come a tremendously long way. We've seen a society that many people thought couldn't withstand a peaceful transition to democracy without a great deal of violence in fact make that transition and do it in relative peace and security.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

Arafat rejected the deal because as a dictator who had directed all his energies toward strengthening the Palestinians hatred toward Israel Arafat could not afford to make peace.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

I don't have to run the Peace Corps. I could live without seeing my picture in the newspapers and without being interviewed.

Before for me peace could have been synonymous with boredom.

I beg Osama to stop warring. He is a Muslim and Islam means peace. Nobody wins in a war... I wish I were tapped in the problem about Iraq. I knew Saddam enough that I could have talked him into surrendering. But it's too late.

What they could do with 'round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.

At the end the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time that she had to kind of live it completely through instead of living by the rules.