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

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

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.

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.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.