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

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 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.

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.

The soul journey is about giving birth to your true self

This is why people are so hard to understand. I cannot even estimate their gravitational pull.

Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.

It was a terrible thing, to love and not know whether you were loved in return, it led to the worst sensations--jealousy, rage, self-loathing--to all these lesser states.

There is a time in the last few days of summer when the ripeness of autumn fills the air.

"Well," said my aunt, "this is his boy - his son. He would be as like his father as it's possible to be, if he was not so like his mother, too."

We all have demons. I am a human being and I have bad days and I have bad things going on in my head that I have to deal with, but I'm very confident in my recovery.

Americans are much more open than people in Britain.

It took me a while to accept that I'm not going to have the curves other girls get.

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.