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

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

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

Tell me a story of deep delight.

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