Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

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