Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

Inside skull vast as outside skull

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

Subject is known by what she sees.

You too must seek the sun.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene