How do poems grow? They grow out of your life..

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you..

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write..

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of..

If a man knew how to live he would never die..

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string--or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?--and the string is what we don't know, our Ign….

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm..

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money..

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time..

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time..

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only li….

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past..

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this..

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do….

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by….

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when yo….

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. Th….

I longed to know the world's name..

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us.….

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All….

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it..