Robert Hass

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.