There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away..

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine..

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity..

Find out what you do best, and then don't do it..

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate..

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there..

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time..

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person..

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world..

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome..

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it..

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a ….

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous..

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning..

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth..

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well..

To live a very long time... is supposed to be the desired object of all human life. But it is not. The main thing is to ride the flood tide... How gl….

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, real….

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny..

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's ….

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitl….