You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

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

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.

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

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.