“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,waiting for our call. We have need for them.They represent the wisdom of our race.”

“When, on your dangerous mission gone,You underrate our foes as dunces,Be wary, not of sudden gun,But of your partner at the dances.”

“When they shall paint our sockets grayAnd light us like a stinking fuse,Remember that we once could say,Yesterday we had a world to lose.”

“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.”

“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”

“Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.”

“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”