The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.