"You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does."

"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."

"Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry."

"The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry."

"Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

"When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints."

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."