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

For the truth is a terrible thing.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

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

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

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.