Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.