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

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

" It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them. "

" 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. "

" Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. "

" There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going. "

" 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. "

" I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know. "

" Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. "

" In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. "

" In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. "

" I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life. "

" Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. "

" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "

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

" Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "

" My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. "

" 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. "

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

" When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. "

" Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. "

" On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream. "

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

" As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. "

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