Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.