Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

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

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

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

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.

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