It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

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

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

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