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.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

I longed to know the world's name.

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

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.