Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

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

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.