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

We get twitted now and then on how we made this country. Well, we took the whole business, of course. It's not just that corner that we took from Mexico. When we got it all together, we got a very shapely country-the best continental cut in all the world, between the two oceans and in the right temperature zone.

Poetry is play. I'd even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

I cut my own hair. I got sick of barbers because they talk too much. And too much of their talk was about my hair coming out.

The best way out is always through.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.