I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

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

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

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.

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

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

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