The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

a poet never feels useful.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!