I'm always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things but to me they're more visual than oral and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Poetry is rather an approach to things to life than it is typographical production.

I have written some songs but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for like a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time because I'd rather be doing other things like knitting.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see-it is rather a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments but I have never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

I'm not one to sit and wallow - I would rather figure out a way around so I can move past it and be at peace with things. I don't like bad feelings gnawing away at me.

The aggressive unprovoked acts of violence against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas are revealing. It is clear they don't want peace but rather seek the ultimate destruction of Israel.

You know I think I think the Palestinians are trying to get away without negotiating. They're trying to get a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it. They're trying to basically detour around peace negotiations by going to the U.N. and have the automatic majority in the U.N. General Assembly give them give them a state.

On balance my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable rather than a vindictive peace.

I can have peace of mind only when I forgive rather than judge.

I would rather have peace in the world than be President.

As I pass it I feel as if I saw a dear old mother sweet in her weakness trembling at the approach of her dissolution but not appealing to me against the inevitable rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience and pointing to a hopeful future.

You know I lose patience really easily I'd rather shop in the grocery store than in the department store. I can pick an apple like nobody's business.

Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature rather than being the lords over nature.

We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.

A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows it flowers wilts and dies scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.