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

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

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

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.