When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

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

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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

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.

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.