Life is tons of discipline.

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.

Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial, but not everything commercial is honest.

I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.