All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I'm not keeping pace With the headlong human race

People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.

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

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

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?