I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

Some people are born to hold keys, while others are born to use them.

Because the part of me that remembers what it was like all those lifetimes ago still cares for you .. loves you.

Sometimes diehard fans expect so much that they're never happy no matter what they get.

If ministry is not about compassion and passion, let it die.

It's hard to be free but when it works, it's worth it!

It's a real gift when you find someone to share your life with.

You're damned if you're too thin and you're damned if you're too heavy. According to the press, I've been both. It's impossible to satisfy everyone and I suggest we stop trying.

Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do

As a man I am flawed, but my music is perfect.

I keep feeling like everyone wants me to apologize for something.