"The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times."
"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
Mark Twain on Age"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."
Henry Ford on Age"Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been."
Mark Twain on Age"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
Kurt Vonnegut on Age"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age."
Robert Frost on Age"Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast."
"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
"In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out."
"Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet."