To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.