The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.

As it is more blessed to receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.

If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.

At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

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

What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.