If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

He says the best way out is always through. / And I can agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.