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.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.

I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.