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.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

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.

I longed to know the world's name.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.