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

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

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

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

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

"For me, prose walks, poetry dances."

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

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

"The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy."

"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."

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

"Consciousness is the glory of creation."

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

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

"Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open."

"The American public does not know poets exist."

"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."

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

"Adversity is a stimulus."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema."

"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."

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

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

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

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