Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

When women go wrong, men go right after them.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.