The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.