The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.