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

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

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.

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

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.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.