“That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.”

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.

No one here likes a wet dog.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.

When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.

Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

To lose one’s health renders science null, are inglorious, strength unavailing, wealth useless, and eloquence powerless.

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