I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.