I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

The future is always beginning now.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

It's very hard to write humor.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Sure I think it is healthy to speak the truth, and be who you are, and be proud of that.

The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.

It's a lot easier to tell the truth usually.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle - among others - that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

The truth is more important than the facts.