Mandelstam's wife committed all his poems to memory in fear that both he and his poems would be destroyed by Stalin.

These questions absorbed me at an age when I was supposed to be getting down the rudimentary facts of American history, which I carelessly neglected.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.