The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.