People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.

I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.

Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.

I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.