“A poet never takes notes..you never take notes in a Love Affair.”

“You've got to love what's lovable, and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”