Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. "

Related Quotes:

" There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want. "

" One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. "

" By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. "

" Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language. "

" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "

" In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it. "

" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "

" As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. "

" I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year. "

" When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology. "

" Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody. "

" It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.' "

" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "

" Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. "

" Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. "

" We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture. "

" Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course. "

" I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them. "

" Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. "

" When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being. "

" In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction. "

" I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer. "

" In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis. "

" I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack. "

" After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry. "

" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "

" I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed. "

" Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying. "

" My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books. "

" When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date. "