I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.