I am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate. Someday I must go into that. There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at.

Writing a poem is discovering.

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

Men work together, whether they work together or apart.

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

There's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.