Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

For whatever you live is life.

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

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

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

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.

History is all explained by geography.