"There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry"

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"

"They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men"

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money"

"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"

"I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation"

"Personality is everything in art and poetry"

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses"

"I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress"

"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention"