I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

So thankful, so grateful.

School is a pile of crap. School has always been a pile of crap – he had just never bothered to think about it until today.

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

Go after what you want as if your life depended on it. Because it Does!

We don't get to pick the genes we want. There's room in this world for beauty to be diverse.

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it.

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

The Romans held Britain from the invasion of Julius Caesar till their voluntary withdrawal from the island, A.D. 420,- that is, about five hundred years.

The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'

There’s no greater search than that of lost love.