“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.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

When you find somebody good, keep them in your life.

Learn the wisdom of compromise. it’s better to bend a little, rather than break relations forever.

Physical violence is inflicted with weapons, but emotional violence is inflicted with words; words can leave invisible scars that can take years, or even lifetimes, to heal.

To find your purpose in life, you must go on a journey of self-discovery.

I was persuaded now that I was destined to lead a life on the Plains.

A still-born son is superior to a foolish son endowed with a long life. The first causes grief for but a moment while the latter like a blazing fire consumes his parents in grief for life.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.