The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.