Robert Penn Warren

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.