To balance China the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy youthful population and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

It would be great if politics were fact-based but it is not and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution not the country.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.

Politics it seems to me for years or all too long has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound and when you understand it it is only ridiculous.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have as far as I can see come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

As for political poetry as it's usually defined it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre and installed instead as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it but anybody can do it.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form and that it's timeless that it reaches back.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

A pet store is a celebration of dogs' existence and an explosion of options. About cats a pet store seems to say 'Here we couldn't think of anything else.' Cats are the Hanukkah of the animal world in this way. They are feted quietly and happily by a minority but there's only so much hoopla applicable to them.

Never be in a hurry do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever even if your whole world seems upset.

One is called to live nonviolently even if the change one works for seems impossible.

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans who are not really Americans.

To me it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists but simply announce that they are don't have the patience to make art.

Cruelty is a part of nature at least of human nature but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other it seems to me in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband that they belong to each other in the name of Nature and are lovers by Divine right in spite of human convention or the laws.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles but ours seems to be based on war and games.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

It seems to be a law of nature that no man unless he has some obvious physical deformity ever is loth to sit for his portrait.