I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.