I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.

You've got to love what's lovable, and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

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.

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

Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.