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.

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.

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

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.

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

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it