The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.