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

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

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

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.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.