I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

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.

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

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.

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

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