Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

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

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

I have a pet lizard named Puff, five goldfish - named Pinky, Brain, Jowels, Pearl and Sandy, an oscar fish named Chef, two pacus, an albino African frog named Whitey, a bonsai tree, four Venus flytraps, a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.

In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.

Considering what Americans have been confronted with in the last ten years, domestically and internationally, it's clear that we need emotional outlets; we have to have some peace from our problems.

I think that American women are further along than any other women in the world. But you can't have peace in a world in which some women or some men or some nations are at different stages of development. There is so much work to be done.

The Lord has done what I wanted Him to do this week. I wanted, primarily, peace about going into pioneer Indian work. And as I analyze my feelings now, I feel quite at ease about saying that tribal work in South American jungles is the general direction of my missionary purpose.