For whatever you live is life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

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

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