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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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