If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.