[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

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

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.

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

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.

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.