A poem should not mean but be.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off