Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.