No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.