Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

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

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

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

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words.