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

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

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

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.