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

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

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.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

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.

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

I have a plot, but not much happens.