I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.

I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.