You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

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.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.

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.

The only certain freedom's in departure.

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

Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other's business.