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

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.

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

I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.