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.

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.

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.

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

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

When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.

I'm sorry about the screaming. I thought you were him.

I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all.

I've never had a very great public life.

Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That's why being on planes all the time is so useful - I'm forced to learn out of boredom.

As a government employee, you can't testify against the government.

We do not draw red lines unless we intend to carry them out. We have made very clear that we are willing to work with China, and we believe China has tried to be helpful.

There will always be somebody more successful, more beautiful, more talented. You have to realize, you're not running their race. You're running your race.

Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.