You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.

You don't always have to get too sexy to get to know a girl.