When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.