Quotes About Life

When a person listens to a good song, and they can look out at the world and their lives and see the dark and the light, the negative and the positive, all the different elements, all come together in one holistic poem, that is a very healing and very reductive thing, and that's what my music is about.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

Starting after 60, I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It's going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?' But I found plenty to laugh about.

As a public poet, people often don't see the reality of my life.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

We sat down and told stories that happened to us in our childhood, to our children. They were all basically based on the truth. These stories were funny and poignant to us. They just took off. These are all stories from my life.

'Baskets' is incredible - 'Baskets' is so funny and poignant and sad and dark.

What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?

Definitely, my whole life I've played as a point guard. I've tried to get in the paint, and I've tried to develop for others.