You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

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

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

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

I longed to know the world's name.

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."

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.