Daily Digest

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.”

“All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

“We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?”

“first of all nothing will happen and a little later nothing will happen again”

“I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.”

“You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you're actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”

“I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.”

“I don't have any sense or urgency about any of my writing, actually. I don't think mankind will be damaged if I don't put out a new album or a new book.”

“Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...”

“The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.”

“I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.”

“I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.”

“Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.”

“Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.”

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.'”

“I've never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out.”

“There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.”

“I was born in a suit.”

“And I'll dance with you in Vienna, I'll be wearing a river's disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss. And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross.”

“Who could have foretold the heart grows old from touching others”

“We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.”

“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”

“I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.”

“Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.”

“Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.”

“I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.”

“As we make our way toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I'd get a Grammy Award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest.”

“I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.”

“I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.”

“Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.”

“I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.”

“Music is the emotional life of most people.”

“We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.”

“I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.”

“My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.”

“I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”

“Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.”

“... i didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through”

“Though I don't believe, I come to you now, and I lift my doubt to your mercy.”

“My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.”

“When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.”

“I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving.”

“To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.”

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”

“I never had the sense that there was an end: that there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.”

“I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”

“Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.”