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" Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose? "

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" When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do. "

" For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. "

" When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had. "

" Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. "

" When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. "

" A teacher is a person who never says anything once. "

" Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it. "

" Language cares. "

" It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page. "

" I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem. "

" A lot happens by accident in poetry. "

" Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful. "

" I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. "

" Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice. "

" History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without. "

" I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks. "

" A chronicle is very different from history proper. "

" We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day. "

" I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. "

" Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed. "

" When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all. "

" I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try. "

" The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me. "

" I have a plot, but not much happens. "

" The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case. "

" I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us. "

" I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow. "

" The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened. "

" I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones. "

" I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. "