I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

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.