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

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

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

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

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.

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.