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

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

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

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

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

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.

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