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.

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.

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.

[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.

There is a different world on the other side of your present attitude.

You are only as pretty as you are nice and smart.

Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.

Whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it.

So be it. I’m happy to bring the country together.

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

She knew too much. -A

My father was a soccer player. All my friends played basketball though, so I stuck with basketball.

The more patient we are, the more understanding we become.