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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.