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

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

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.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

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