Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer.

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.