Love enters later in life through the cracks left by the first heartbreak.

It is wrong to try to avoid the struggle against imperialism under the pretext that independence and revolution are important, but that peace is still more precious.

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

I'd rather be a born-once hog than a born-again Christian any day.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

After fifty most of the bullshit is gone.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

There is nothing more aggravating than a man who won't talk back - unless it is a woman who won't.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.