So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

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.

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

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.

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.