Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.