Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

I don't have principles. I have nerves.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.