I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.