A. R. Ammons

"I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiet…"

"Artist should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write."

"I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write…"

"In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, fo…"

"Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. …"

"Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will."

"Somewhere along the line, I don’t know just when, it seems to me I was able to manage the multifariousness of things and the unity of things so much more easily than I ever had before. I saw a continu…"

"Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings."