[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

i am a woman and a poem. – visceral

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

Life is seductive, yet so few allow themselves to be seduced.

There's a reason that I love this town.

A government, forever changing and changeable, is, indeed, in a state bordering upon anarchy and confusion.

Boredom, not the will, is the mother of change. Necessity is the father.

Sometimes it's better not to look back.

Lee tells his troops. After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.

Here, cover yourself with this and I'll wash your shorts." "Oh, I don't care if you see me," says Peeta.