Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.