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

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

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

Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.