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

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

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

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

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great 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.