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

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.