Politics is human beings it's addition rather than subtraction.

It's like being at the kids' table at Thanksgiving - you can put your elbows on it you don't have to talk politics... no matter how old I get there's always a part of me that's sitting there.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

Frankly I don't mind not being President. I just mind that someone else is.

Justice sir is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Poetry asks people to have values form opinions care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

Since the printing press came into being poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm well-being and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it it appears to be prose but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire even though the desire be unconscious intensity of life or completeness of experience the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

A lyric it is true is the expression of personal emotion but then so is all poetry and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry differing from each other in essence is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings to the unknown and returns us to our rational structured selves refreshed.

I've always written. When I was in school the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

But for me being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

I work on words mostly toward them being poetry or short stories and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

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.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether the trick they miss is that being called this thing with the weight of tradition behind it and with the association of the Royal family does allow you to have conversations and to open doors and wallets for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.