No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?