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.

The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

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.

To grow old is to lose everything.