We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

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.

I'm drowning in papers.

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

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.