Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.