It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 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.

It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.