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

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

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

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

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