I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.

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

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.