Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid..

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and….

I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighb….

Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder..

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store..

Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of Jul….

Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often….

I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State….

Human life is too difficult for people..

I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys..

Touch was important. The evening of the Third of July we would go around the neighborhood and look at the fireworks others had bought, taking them ou….

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage..

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poe….

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten..

To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance..

There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa t….

The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, ….

I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Ind….

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed..

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat..

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first….