“…the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.”

“I thought as a kid that talent was God-given, but it’s not. God gives you talent and you should use that talent with the real meaning of that word. I was stubborn. Maybe being young had something to do with it.”

“Akhmatova's seeming successor as the best living Russian poet is Voznesensky. His talent is dazzling. He has the gift of fresh, witty perception, works with unusual images and modern rhythms. His poetry is marvelously dynamic.”

“In real life, my sweet poet,” the duke said as the swordsmen circled, “words can never be undone.”

“Whole poems are made out of many single poems we call words... I am trying to recover a part of the poet's work which has been lost. Our first poets were the namers, not the rhymers.”

“You have to really work at it to write. I guess there has to be talent first; but even with talent you still have to work at it, to write.”

“One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

“Everybody has talent, but ability takes hard work.”

“In Australia during WWII, a couple of established poets invented the supposedly nonsensical works of a fictitious poet called Ern Malley and used them to discredit the modernist pretensions of the young editor who printed them. It never occurred to them that as writers of talent they were not in a position to suppose that they could deliberately write something perfectly meaningless.”

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”