Follow your own weird.

Adversity is a stimulus.

Acclaim is a distraction.

Life is adventure, not predicament.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

We are all participants in the marvelous.

The American public does not know poets exist.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

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

At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

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

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

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

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

You're closer to your glory leaping an abyss than re-upholstering a rut.

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

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

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

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

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

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

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

I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.

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

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

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.

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.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

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.

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.

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.

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