I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

He didn’t miss them. He didn’t miss any of his life, really, especially the last year. Time had simply been a bookmark. Something that held his place while he waited to finish the story.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

I eat really healthy, and if I'm tired, I take a nap.

The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

If you really have integrity, there are very few people who can insult you, or honor you.

Whatever you accomplish in a lifetime will be in direct proportion to the intensity and persistence of your faith

We have the power to make reality. Why make it inside boundaries, when the boundless is so near?

Dishonest, which is Hillary Clinton in the eyes of the American people, beats crazy. Dishonest loses to normal. So, let's just pick somebody out of the phone book if we have to.

The one thing that reconciles me to the fact of being a woman is the reflection that it delivers me from the necessity of being married to one.

She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.