The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

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 never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

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

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.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.