I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.