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

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

Human life is too difficult for people.

I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.