I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.