"When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books."

"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird."

"I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now."

"In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry."

"I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression."

"Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."

"To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that."

"My dad's passion was to teach adults to read so they could read to their kids."