“I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

Poetry is life distilled.

Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.

I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

It is brave to be involved.

Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

We’ve talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

What’s said is said and goes upon its way Like it or not, repent it as you may.

A lot of what gets on the radio isn’t saying anything other than somebody wants to be famous and will do whatever they’re told to get it.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so.

All has not been said and never will be.