The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time

We are most alive when we're in love

Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul's very life

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five