But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

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.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

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

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?