Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

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.

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.

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

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.

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