Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard..

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine..

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defea….

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie..

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle..

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished..

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most du….

He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it..

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity..

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it..

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

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….

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..

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

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

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

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 ….

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

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

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

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 ….