One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

Excellence costs a great deal.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.