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.

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

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.

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

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

For the truth is a terrible thing.