Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.