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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "

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

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

" I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 don't have a computer. I never have had one. "

" 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. "

" Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it. "

" 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. "

" However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. "

" A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s. "

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

" 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. "

" I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry. "