When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

They are commiting murder who merely live.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

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