Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

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

When you know who you are, you won’t have false modesty

As long as you hate, there will be people to hate.

Friendship is love without his wings!

After I published my first book, my sister, known as Kali Willows, began writing. She fell as in love with it as I did. She has a number of short stories.

The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning.

The stone neither speaks nor gives anything. Therefore its service is fruitless and its worship is of no avail.

Enough words, little wisdom. [Lat., Satis eloquentiae sapientiae parum.]

It's the privilege of a lifetime for me to work with the most innovative people on Earth.

I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.