It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

But can one actually see beauty with eyes blurred by the lack of almost everything a human being needs?

People make mistakes. They look at the surface of things and see what they want to.

The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.

Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history which cuts without wounding and enobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

Have you noticed that all the people in favor of birth control are already born?

It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.

Critics should find meaningful work.

Have we not the brains to think? Hands to work? Hearts to feel? And lives to live?

Over the epitaph of this generation it will say ENTERTAINED TO DEATH.

It's only when you're flying above it that you realize how incredible the Earth really is