The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.Collection: Good
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.Collection: Travel
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.Collection: History
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.Collection: Poetry
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.Collection: Poetry
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.Collection: Poetry
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.Collection: Funny
A lot happens by accident in poetry.Collection: Poetry
A teacher is a person who never says anything once.Collection: Teacher
Language cares.Collection: Communication
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.Collection: Poetry
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.
I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.Collection: Responsibility
Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.Collection: Science
Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.Collection: Writing
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.Collection: Writing
This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.Collection: America
Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.Collection: Religious
[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).Collection: Students
We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.Collection: Sex
Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.Collection: Kings
History is where tensions were.Collection: Tension
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversalsCollection: Party
That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.Collection: Mean