Good policy makes good politics and what I've done has been good politics.

Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof it is temporary expedient often wise in party politics almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

I'm looking for a guy who makes you want to dance and write poetry all day long.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

The more poetry you have in the head the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it when we see it but we can't define it.