If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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

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.

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.