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

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

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

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

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.

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.