Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.

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

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!

It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.

Your mind is an entire world, your heart is an entire cosmos, and your soul is an entire universe.

When I sleep tonight I dream of what I will imagine tomorrow.

Polish those gems within brightly, so you may shine...

Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.

The Law may be hard but it's the law.

Either I believe I can be the best heavyweight fighter in the world and beat everyone, or I will not. I feel I can beat everyone as a heavyweight.

I have learned to pare down what I do and still be effective and strong in a role.

I've always been just as interested in making people think as I am in making them feel, and one of the things this scientific process allows me to do is make the audience look differently at dance.