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

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.

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.