I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

She's no angel.He's no saint.

I stayed in New York City for the first time, I'd always wanted to do that.

Broke people giving financial advice is like a shop teacher with missing fingers.

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.

I wanted to make a concrete impression; the idea of a woman that is free, moody, never the object, one that has a complete control of her finances and knows how it is to be independent.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said that we should not allow the courts to have a monopoly on the interpretation of what is constitutional and what is not.

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely-caluculated less or more.