W. S. Merwin

“Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value.”

“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.”

“What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.”

“That's a great gift to be given, that feeling of no fear.”

“In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again.”

“He said you should write about 75 lines every day. You know, Pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything.”