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

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

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.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

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.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.