My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I write what's given me to write.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

I like cats. I used to have a lot of cats, but I don't anymore, now I just have a dog. It does take a certain temperament to have a cat, as they do have certain personalities.

Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Few artists can afford artistic temperament.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

I think the diva is kind of a cliche. My definition of a diva is somebody whose talent does not match what they're trying to play, so all this temperament comes out.

To illustrate what I mean, an apt dancer may be in thorough unison with the others in that particular group, and at the same time reveal a difference in dancing temperament, rhythm or technique; she may phrase, accentuate or actually interpret differently.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.

Music inflames temperament.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.

It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual's temperament and environment.

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

It has been argued that British girls are incapable of deep feeling or brilliant acting owing to their lack of temperament. This, I am positive, is not true.