No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.