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.

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.

For whatever you live is life.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

There is no country but the heart.