But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.