"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem"

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears"

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

"I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza"

"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 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"

"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry"

"Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry"