A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

‚Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

I’m an emotional person.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!