Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst.

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.