We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

An answer is always a form of death.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes chess made flesh a mixture of proud chivalry and base in both senses greed.

To write poetry and to commit suicide apparently so contradictory had really been the same attempts at escape.

There are two kinds of hangover in one you feel ill and incapable in the other you feel ill and lucid.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

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.