"The only limits are, as always, those of vision."
"The American public does not know poets exist."
"Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect."
"Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers."
"In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets."
"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."
"I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public."
"I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action."
"A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living."
"Acclaim is a distraction."
"Adversity is a stimulus."
"Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be."
"Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open."
"Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite."
"Consciousness is the glory of creation."
"The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy."
"True delicacy is not a fragile thing."
"I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside."
"My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls."
"Amazement awaits us at every corner."
"If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life."
"My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it."
"For me, prose walks, poetry dances."
"And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts."
"Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater."
