Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

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

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.