I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

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

What we sometimes see as annoying, incessant questions from a child may be a plea for recognition. Maybe they do not need an answer as much as attention.

Love has no contingencies, no expectations, no ideals. Love is a gift to thyself, the experience of divinity in full expression.

Great, I thought. We just blowtorched a national monument.

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Before I came out, I had a lot of anger. For years people would ask, 'How are you doing?' and I'd say, 'Good, fine.' It's show business, and that's what you have to show.

The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

It is always to early to quit.

Fear is instantly debilitating and love instantly empowering