When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.