There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.

Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

Every time somebody writes a theory about where literature's going, that person is not only contributing thought but nudging things to happen in one way or the other. Just as in painting, there's much more interest in the American scene painters and the early American... like the Ashcan school of painters. Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that Norman Rockwell would again be considered a serious painter? And yet, there are a lot of people who are saying Rockwell was a very accomplished technician. These things are constantly moving.

Somebody comes to my house and admires what I've done, sometimes I just give it to them. Because I don't want to get it all tied up in all that professional stuff because I have to do that as a writer. I don't need that. I need something like painting, where I can just play.

When I was a kid, I suppose I got more praise for being able to draw things and paint things than I did for my little amateur poems I was writing. But the thing that I'm trying to do with my painting is that I'm trying to keep it in the realm of pleasure. I don't show my work, I don't try to sell it.