Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

If I was good each week, my father would take me to a different pet store each Saturday. I had a snake, horny toads, turtles, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs... I kept my alligator in the bathtub until it got too big.

You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and then I'm giving you sadness and guilt.

Vinyl is the real deal. I've always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don't really own the album. And it's not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.

I used to love dogs until I discovered cats.

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

Palestine is the issue, and until this issue is resolved, there can be no peace.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

People are stubborn about what they perceive to be the right thing or the wrong thing, and it takes a long time to filter this human condition. There's a waiting period until people catch up. But if you have patience - which it takes when someone thinks differently from you - everybody always catches up. That patience is a wonderful virtue.

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.

When you are starting to run an online business, you need to narrow down a niche market and be able to stick with it until you have a good profit coming in. This can take a while, so you need to have a great deal of patience to make sure that your business is moving in the right direction.

The notion that patience is a virtue is something you don't fully appreciate until you're a parent. You need endless patience with little ones.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

Right-wing extremism is all about patience. That is, until it makes its move, and then it is sudden and explosive.

Business is a sprint until you find an opportunity, then it's the patience of a marathon runner.

As a father you're guilty until proven innocent. You're a second class citizen in terms of parenting. As a father you have to prove your ability to be a father whilst residence, power and control is left solely with the mother.

No one knows his true character until he has run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan and raised an adolescent.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I've had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm's way until they could be their own guides.