“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
“You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.”
“I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.”
“Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.”
“All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.”
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