The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words