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.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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