For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.