Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.

I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.