The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

There is no method except yourself.