Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."

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.

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

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

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

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