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The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble.

We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

War's not black and white; it's gray. If you don't fight in the gray area, you're going to lose.

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

I do not mean for one second to suggest that 'White Doves at Morning' was written with a movie deal in mind. Certainly not.

Feathers predate birds.