Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

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.

One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.

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

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.