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

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.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

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

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

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