Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.