Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

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.

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

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

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.