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

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

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.

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

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.