After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Violet speaks Spanish and understands it. She loves Cuban food! My mom is very good at teaching her about our culture, whether it be the food or Spanish or explaining to her that she's Cuban.

I took up boxing as a fitness thing. I got obsessed, and I would go every day when I wasn't working. It's just an insane sport when you get into it.

You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated

I live a very balanced life. I am very good at delegating responsibilities.

The fact that I fell into this seemed more like a stroke of good fortune than hard work. Not to say that I didn't work hard, but it wasn't like, "I'm going to be a musician."

The only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is You.

Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place.

Through thickest gloom look back, immortal shade, On that confusion which thy death has made.

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.