When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.