Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.