When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.
Stanley KunitzThe poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.
Stanley KunitzOne critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.
Stanley KunitzWe have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz